THINK Ahead: The AI-inflation tug of war that’s driving markets crazy - ing think

Strong inflation, HIKE RATES! Dodgy data centres, CUT RATES! In a week when markets couldn't make up their minds on the direction of US monetary policy, James Smith gets to the heart of the question: why exactly is the Federal Reserve hiking rates? Even by this year’s crazy standards, this week’s move in the US rates market was WILD. Here’s how it went down. US inflation came in hot. Two-year swap rates rose by a whopping 20 basis points. Then, only hours later, the move completely reversed as news broke of the troubles at GPU cloud provider CoreWeave, seen by investors as a harbinger of doom for leveraged data centre providers/all data centres/the whole AI story/the US economy/all of humanity (delete as appropriate).