01, CPI

Last night, the U.S. Department of Labor released the latest inflation data. Following the American custom, the CPI and PPI are announced separately. In addition to these two inflation data that are also published monthly in our country, the United States also has another inflation data statistic, the PCE price index, which will be announced at the end of the month.

Therefore, last night's CPI index was the earliest inflation data to be announced, thus garnering strong attention from the market.

Prior to this, the market generally predicted that the year-on-year growth rate of this CPI would drop significantly again, reaching 6.1% to 6.2%. However, the data announced last night actually reached 6.4%, which clearly indicates that the market was overly optimistic about the decline in inflation.

This figure has fallen from last month's 6.5%, and it also represents a continuous decline since the highest of 9.1% in the middle of last year, but it must be said that inflation is far from meeting expectations, not to mention how far it is from the 2% target.

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In addition, we also need to pay attention to the fact that although the year-on-year growth rate has fallen, the month-on-month increase was actually 0.1%.

The more important reason for the decline in year-on-year data is actually due to the inflation data of the corresponding month last year having already risen quite high, with the CPI year-on-year growth in January last year already exceeding 7%, so it is normal for the current CPI to fall slightly under a higher base.

However, the month-on-month increase indicates that the price index for this month is actually slightly higher than that of the previous month.

The month-on-month decline of 0.1% in December was the first decline in two years, but it has risen again by 0.1% this month, which fully demonstrates that U.S. prices are still fluctuating at a high level and have not formed a trend of continuous decline.

02, U.S. Stocks

(The translation of the second part is not provided as the original text ends abruptly.)Although the CPI data was much worse than expected, investors' optimistic sentiment is still in inertia.

Last night, the three major U.S. stock indices experienced gains and losses, without forming a one-sided decline. Among them, the Nasdaq Composite rose by 0.57%, the S&P 500 Index was almost flat, and only the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by nearly 0.5%.

However, the ups and downs throughout the trading session indicated that the market had different interpretations during the process of digesting the news. The three major indices opened lower in sync at the start, then welcomed a wave of increases. But later they fell again, narrowing the losses by the close, with the Nasdaq Composite even turning positive.

In the end, tech stocks still saw more gains, but the increases were not significant. Amazon, Meta, and Google all rose by less than 0.2%, while Microsoft and Netflix's increases exceeded 0.3%.

However, chip stocks had higher gains, with GlobalFoundries' increase reaching 8%, and Nvidia rising by nearly 5%.

As for new energy vehicles, there were gains and losses. Tesla rose significantly by 7.5%, Li Auto increased by 2.7%, but XPeng Motors fell by 0.2%.

03, Federal Reserve

Although the gains and losses in the U.S. stock market last night were not significant, following the past pattern of U.S. stocks falling on the second trading day after bad news is announced, it is quite possible that U.S. stocks will see a substantial sell-off in the coming days.

This is because the market will begin to continuously analyze and speculate about the Federal Reserve's interest rate hike pace.

After the inflation data was released, the interest rate futures market further raised the forecast for the terminal rate. Before July, the Federal Reserve will once again raise interest rates, reaching a level of 5% to 5.25%. If the inflation data does not show a significant decline, the interest rate in the second half of the year may ultimately exceed 5.5%. Some pessimistic analysts even believe it could reach 6%.