“The S&P 500 is on track for its worst first-half performance since 1970, down nearly 20% this year,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Wall Street Journal: “U.S. public pension funds don’t have nearly enough money to pay for all their obligations to future retirees. A growing number are adopting a risky solution: investing borrowed money. As both stock and bond markets struggle, it’s a precarious gamble.”

“You can look but you won’t find a stretch of futility as pervasive as the one that is landing on Wall Street,” Bloomberg reports.

“Even in the long and storied history of market meltdowns, the breadth of losses is without equal, based on data that goes back to the Great Depression. In five of the seven sessions through Thursday, at least nine in 10 S&P 500 stocks dropped, a record run of widespread losses.”

Bloomberg: The next crisis to hit markets may be about liquidity.

“The price of bit­coin lurched be­low $20,000, and be­low a level widely mon­i­tored by cryptocurrency en­thu­si­asts, as a bru­tal sell­off in crypto showed no signs of abat­ing,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The Federal Reserve approved the largest interest rate increase since 1994 and signaled it would continue lifting rates this year at the most rapid pace in decades as it races to slow the economy and combat inflation that is running at a 40-year high,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Vox: Stopping inflation is going to hurt.

“The 2022 stock sell-off intensified on Monday with the S&P 500 tumbling to a fresh low for the year and closing in bear market territory as recession fears grew ahead of this week’s key Federal Reserve meeting,” CNBC reports.

Wall Street Journal: “Meanwhile, a rout in cryptocurrencies highlighted investors’ increasing unwillingness to hang on to their most speculative holdings.”

“A string of troubling inflation reports in recent days is likely to lead Federal Reserve officials to consider surprising markets with a larger-than-expected 0.75-percentage-point interest rate increase at their meeting this week,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Federal Reserve officials agreed at their last meeting that the central bank needed to move ‘expeditiously’ to bring down the most rapid pace of inflation in 40 years, with most participants expecting as many as three half-a-percentage point interest rate increases in the months ahead,” the New York Times reports.

“Stocks dropped on Friday, pushing the S&P 500 into a bear market for the first time since early in the pandemic, as investors feared the effects of higher inflation, rising interest rates and the risk of a recession,” the New York Times reports.

“The S&P 500 was down about 1.6 percent in intraday trading, pushing the benchmark index into bear market territory, a Wall Street term for a 20 percent decline from a recent peak — in this case, since Jan. 3.”

“Stock futures slid, pointing to deeper losses for U.S. markets on growing worries of an economic slowdown,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell emphasized his resolve to get inflation down, saying Tuesday he will back interest rate increases until prices start falling back toward a healthy level,” CNBC reports.

Nicholas  Weaver: “So the stock market and the bond market are a positive-sum game. There are more winners than losers. Cryptocurrency starts with zero-sum. So it starts with a world where there can be no more winning than losing. We have systems like this. It’s called the horse track. It’s called the casino. Cryptocurrency investing is really provably gambling in an economic sense. And then there’s designs where those power bills have to get paid somewhere. So instead of zero-sum, it becomes deeply negative-sum.”

“Effectively, then, the economic analogies are gambling and a Ponzi scheme. Because the profits that are given to the early investors are literally taken from the later investors. This is why I call the space overall, a ‘self-assembled’ Ponzi scheme. There’s been no intent to make a Ponzi scheme. But due to its nature, that is the only thing it can be.”

John Gruber: “There just isn’t any there there other than burning an unconscionable amount of electricity.”

“Traders’ flight from risky investments has halved the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, wiping out more than $1 trillion worth of digital money since November,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Wild swings are fairly common with cryptocurrencies, but even seasoned investors were left reeling as bitcoin dropped 29% over a seven-day losing streak that just ended as a stablecoin—one part of the crypto world that touted its stability—unexpectedly crashed.”

“The Senate confirmed Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to a second four-year term that is shaping up to be every bit as trying as his first term as the central bank faces the highest inflation in 40 years,” the Wall Street Journal reports. 

“Mr. Powell’s nomination, approved Thursday on an 80-19 bipartisan vote, has been on track for months to win bipartisan approval despite unease over inflation and aggressive interest-rate increases that the Fed has urgently commenced to cool price pressures.”