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Central banks unite vs. inflation

On Wednesday, the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 75 basis points — the biggest hike since 1994 — as it scrambled to contain runaway inflation. What's more, new projections show that the Fed plans to hike rates by an additional 1.75 percentage points until the end of the year — the most aggressive pace since Paul Volcker engineered a recession with double-digit interest rates to tame sky-high inflation in the early 1980s. Just hours before the Fed concluded its meeting, the European Central Bank unveiled a new bond-buying tool to protect the Eurozone's weakest economies from higher borrowing costs, as the ECB gets ready to fight inflation by jacking up interest rates next month for the first time in 11 years. In recent days, rising premiums on Italian and Spanish bonds compared to German ones had rung alarm bells throughout the Eurozone, with painful memories of its debt crisis in the early 2010s. The twin announcements sent shockwaves through global financial markets, with investors already panicking that a recession might be unavoidable to ease out-of-control prices due to a combination of the war in Ukraine, pandemic-related supply chain snarls, and massive stimulus spending on both sides of the Atlantic.