Today's Top Stories From the Breitbart News Desk

Durable goods orders came in below expectations on Tuesday just as new home sales did on Monday. These reports are being read by many on Wall Street as signals that growth may have peaked in the second quarter and that the economy is now cooling off in the absence of another round of stimulus checks.

That would be a relief to Jerome Powell and his comrades at the Federal Reserve. They have unilaterally decided to transform their statutory duty to seek maximum employment into a quest for racial and gender equity, a novel goal for a central bank. In their view, they need to keep monetary policy accommodative for longer than would have been the practice in the past in order to bring this about. Much higher than expected growth and inflation, however, was casting the viability of that plan into doubt.

The Q2 peak growth thesis can now combine with the increasing alarm over rising covid variant infections that led the CDC to announce a new mask indoor advisory that applies even to fully vaccinated people. That should buy Powell plenty of breathing room to promise that we are nowhere near a taper of the Fed's bond purchases, much less closer to actually raising interest rates.

As much as we hate to spoil the party, the Fed will be playing a dangerous game if it takes the slowdown in new home sales and durable goods as evidence that the inflation danger is passing. There's good reason to suspect that home sales are slowing because they are so expensive and hard to find. The same goes for computers and autos. Keeping rates low is not going to do much to ameliorate the shortages but could pump up demand enough to keep prices rising.

– Alex Marlow & John Carney
Breitbart News Network