Yet another interesting week! Oh, how we miss the boring days, when everything just went up all the time.

And it’s still, of course, all about inflation and the Federal Reserve. I would have guessed, like many people, that the CPI number would come in a bit worse than expected this month, given the persistence of cost increases like high rents and rising salaries for service workers and trickle-down food prices, and it did… but it wasn’t shockingly worse, those economist estimates are pretty much as close as anyone should expect at a time when prices and demand are bouncing around like crazy (used car prices down! New car prices up! Airfares surge 43%! Gas prices down! Big layoffs afoot! Why can’t we find anyone who wants to work!?)

The world is confusing and unpredictable. That’s scary for investors, and they’re reacting to it all.

And interest rates are going up faster than at any time in most investors’ adult lives. That changes all the valuation expectations, largely because every investment is compared to the “risk free” rate of returns of government bonds, and interest rates have therefore become our primary obsession.

So of course the “a little hot” inflation number drove a strong reaction in the markets, again, as speculators on the margins continue to bet each week either on the Fed doubling down with bigger rate hikes and a “higher rates for longer” future… or on the Fed “pivoting” to be more “dovish” and using smaller rate hikes or signaling a “pause” in the rate hikes.

And after that latest release of the consumer price index (CPI), the primary measure of inflation, the market collapsed almost immediately, falling close to 4% on the news.

But wait, an hour or two later and the market turns positive for the day, then surges higher, and by mid-afternoon, six hours after that “too hot” inflation number foretold doom, most of the market indices were up about 3%.

That’s a crazy swing for one day, I saw some reports that it was the third-largest one-day swing in history for the market averages. And it reminds us that while the world is confusing and unpredictable, and the economy is sending mixed signals about what will happen next, the stock market doubles down on that — stocks can take all that uncertainty and turn it into a parade of lemmings going off ...