To be fair though, a lot of the weakness that we saw in stocks in 2022 was in the sectors that were ludicrously overvalued heading into the year.

When you can't get "free money" from the Fed to stay in business, you have to actually turn a profit. Apple's profit was based on consumer spending but consumers want food more than a new iPhone. The rest of the tech companies never earned enough to justify their values.

I seriously wonder who taught these politicians economics. All the free money over the past several years is the cause of the inflation! More free money will just make it worse.

I agree. 2023 is going to be a far more difficult year than most are envisioning. You can't stop 7% inflation by raising rates to 5.15% (as the market expects) and then holding steady. You need to raise rates to about 10%, which will obliterate the economy and the budgets of nearly every developed nation in the world (including the USA).

The problem is that even 3% is not anywhere close to enough to save the economy when inflation is at 9.10%!

Why are you using free cash flow and not distributable cash flow?

I see your point though. Let me investigate this one further and maybe I'll have a response for this article.

The problem here is that there's no easy way to play short-term natural gas price increases in Europe for Americans. LNG won't work because that normally requires a 15-20 year commitment. I can't see any LNG producer agreeing to just give Europe a couple shipments.

Shale companies have been largely focusing on generating free cash flow too and letting production die off. An inability to obtain financing almost certainly points to substantially higher energy prices going forward.

I think it's becoming even more obvious now with that $1.9 billion stimulus package!

I don't know. Thus far there has been inflation, but it's been confined to the financial market and other assets like real estate. It hasn't resulted in inflation yet (as the Fed reports inflation) because the new money hasn't entered the economy. The question is, what will happen when people actually want to spend their wealth on things other than stocks or real estate? There's also some issues with the way the Fed measures inflation. The price of food, for example, was 3.90% higher in September 2020 than in September 2019. It was actually much higher over most of this year once the money-printing started: tradingeconomics.com/united-states/food-inflation I don't know about you, but I'd call a rise in the price of food inflation! It's hard to deny that the cost of healthcare is still rising. I'd call that inflation too. The Fed's calculations tend to ignore things like this because that would mean that the government would have to pay out bigger cost-of-living increases to Social Security and other benefit recipients and that would strain the Federal budget more than it already is. So I don't think we'll see inflation as reflected in the Fed's numbers. I think we're already seeing it in the cost of goods that the average person buys!

Interesting. The question is whether or not this unprecedented money supply expansion will lead to inflation.