Sometimes I think that we truly are living in Bizarro World.  We just witnessed one of the most horrible financial disasters in years, and economic activity is dramatically slowing down all around us, but Wall Street is celebrating.  In fact, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose more than 1,200 points on Thursday.  Despite everything else that is going wrong, investors were absolutely giddy because the inflation number that was just released was slightly lower than what most experts were anticipating.  A lot of people seem to think that this could mean that the Federal Reserve will soon stop hiking interest rates, but that isn't going to happen.  Jerome Powell continues to insist that rates will keep going higher until the official inflation rate is back down to about 2 percent, and we are a long, long way from there.

So I really don't understand why there was such a buying frenzy on Wall Street on Thursday.

It just doesn't make any sense.