Hotter-Than-Expected Inflation Clouds Rate-Cut Outlook
4 min
US: Inflation eased again in January but came in above Wall Street’s expectations, clouding the Federal Reserve’s path to rate cuts and potentially giving the central bank breathing space to wait until the middle of the year.
The Labor Department reported Tuesday that consumer prices rose 3.1% in January from a year earlier, versus a December gain of 3.4%. That marked the lowest reading since June.
Still, the consumer-price index was higher than the predicted 2.9%, a disappointment for investors who hope the Fed will cut rates sooner rather than later. Rate cuts tend to help stock prices by boosting economic activity and reducing competition from bonds for investor dollars.
The release gave a nasty jolt to markets. Stocks fell sharply and bond yields rose. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slid more than 500 points, or about 1.4%, its worst one-day decline since March. For all three major U.S. stock indexes, it was their worst performance on a CPI release day since September 2022 , according to Dow Jones Market Data.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 4.315%, bringing it to its highest level since the end of November.
Interest-rate futures, which before Tuesday’s report implied the central bank would probably begin cutting rates by its May meeting, now suggest a June start date is more likely.
Where the Fed could go from here
Investors’ belief that Fed cuts were imminent has helped fuel the rally in stocks. The Dow on Monday had hit its 12th record close of 2024.
But Tuesday’s inflation report underscores why Fed officials have been dismissive of such expectations. Some Fed officials have suggested that the pace of improvement over the past six months might overstate underlying progress in containing price pressures.
Officials have said they aren’t ready to entertain rate cuts at their next meeting, March 19-20, because they want to see more evidence that inflation is returning to their 2% target.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell has said officials want to see more evidence that inflation is returning to its 2% goal, which is measured against a separate gauge to be released later this month by the Commerce Department.
“It’s not that the data aren’t good enough. It’s that there’s really six months of data,” Powell said in an interview on “60 Minutes” earlier this month. “It doesn’t need to be better than what we’ve seen, or even as good. It just needs to be good.”
Core prices, which exclude food and energy items in an effort to better track inflation’s underlying trend, were up 3.9% in January. That was equal to December’s gain, which was the lowest since mid-2021.
From a month earlier, overall prices were up a seasonally adjusted 0.3%, and core prices were up 0.4%—larger gains than economists expected.
Two measures of inflation
The Fed’s preferred measure of inflation has been running cooler than the Labor Department’s, and analysts said that could continue in January. The figures released Tuesday calculate medical care and airfares differently, and those categories were especially strong in January. The Labor Department’s measure also puts a much higher weight on shelter costs, which for both owners and renters are derived from rents. Shelter costs accounted for 0.23 percentage point of the monthly gain in overall prices in January. Shelter costs were up 0.6% month over month.
Some Fed officials have said they are looking for evidence that a slowdown in price pressures is broadening beyond goods such as used cars, which have seen prices decline over the past year. Tuesday’s figure showed the opposite: Price declines accelerated for goods while price increases accelerated for services.
And prices are still far above where they were before the pandemic—especially for items that most Americans buy often, like groceries.
The sting of those past price increases might be part of why so many Americans remain down on the economy . An analysis conducted by Goldman Sachs economists suggests that frustration with high price levels might have contributed to low confidence readings that persisted in the early 1980s even after inflation had slipped sharply.
“It does seem like it takes a while for confidence to recover, in part because people are focused on levels rather than changes,” said Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius .
The Labor Department’s measure of overall consumer prices was up 19.6% this January from four years earlier, just before the pandemic hit. In contrast, prices were up 8.9% in the four years ended January 2020.
Economists generally expect inflation to cool this year, though they caution the process could be bumpy. Cooling prices for newly signed leases, for example, should eventually translate into lower shelter costs.
“I can tell inflation has gotten better,” said Mike Poore, of Henderson, Ky. “That’s definitely a good thing. It’s a shame it’s not happening quicker.”
The high cost of groceries
A Bank of America Institute analysis of customer data found households tended to make far more transactions a month for food and drinks at restaurants and bars, for groceries and for gasoline than they do for other items. Labor Department figures show that prices in all three of those frequent-transaction categories are higher, relative to before the pandemic, than prices overall.
Research from University of California, Berkeley economist Ulrike Malmendier and three co-authors found that prices for items that people buy more often play an outsize role in framing their inflation expectations. “In terms of what gets ingrained in people’s brains, it’s stuff that they purchase frequently,” she said.
Other research Malmendier has conducted examines the scarring effects of inflation episodes , which can have persistent, and potentially costly, effects on people’s financial decisions. She is heartened by the fact that inflation has retreated relatively quickly from the 9.1% it hit in June 2022 —a contrast to the experience of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when inflation remained elevated for years.
“I’m a little less worried about long-lasting effects than I was in 2022,” she said.
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The voices reshaping how Australians think about money — and why credibility matters more than reach.
6 min
The best financial advice many Australians are receiving right now is not coming from licensed advisers charging by the hour. It is coming through a phone screen, in the ten minutes between work and dinner, from creators who have built credibility the hard way: by being right, being transparent, and being specific in a space where vagueness has always been the easy default.
This is not a ranking by follower count. Follower count is a measure of distribution, not of quality. What follows is a ranking by substance — credentials, accuracy, community depth, and the quality of what an audience actually learns from following these accounts. The distinction matters, because the Australians acting on this content are making real financial decisions with real money.
1- Queenie Tan – Corporate Authorised Representative; Co-Founder & Director, Invest With Queenie & Billroo
There are finance influencers who talk about building wealth, and there are those who document it in real time with receipts. Queenie Tan belongs firmly in the second category. Starting from a $400-per-week income, Tan built her net worth past $1 million while publishing the actual numbers — income, savings rate, investment decisions — for an audience of more than 400,000 across platforms.
She is a Corporate Authorised Representative, co-founder of the personal finance app Billroo, and the author of a book that has become a practical reference for young Australians navigating ETFs, superannuation and property. What separates her from the crowded field of money educators is precision: she does not talk in principles when she can talk in percentages.
2- Alan Kohler – Editor-in-Chief, Eureka Report; Editor-in-Chief, InvestSMART Group; ABC News finance presenter, host of Inside Business.
If Queenie Tan represents the new wave of personal finance creators, Alan Kohler represents something the new wave will spend decades trying to build: institutional credibility that has survived multiple economic cycles. As Editor-in-Chief of the Eureka Report and InvestSMART Group, and a decades-long presence on ABC News, Kohler has spent more than thirty years making financial analysis accessible without dumbing it down.
His coverage of RBA decisions, market movements and economic policy is cited by podcasters, journalists and fund managers alike. He is not chasing virality. He does not need to.
3- Aleks Nikolic – Corporate lawyer; host, Big Swinging Stocks podcast
Most finance creators address the mechanics of money. Aleks Nikolic addresses the psychology — and that distinction explains why her following is as loyal as it is. Operating as Broke Girl Wealth across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, Nikolic covers ETFs, crypto and investment strategy, but her real differentiator is a willingness to discuss the emotional architecture of financial decision-making.
Shame around debt. Fear around market volatility. The limiting beliefs that stop people acting on what they already know. In a space where confidence is routinely performed, her candour is a genuine competitive advantage.
4- Bryce Leske & Alec Renehan – Equity Mates Media
Equity Mates did not build a following. They built a media company. What began as a podcast by two friends learning to invest has grown into Australia’s most established investing media brand, covering ASX stocks, ETFs, global markets and fund manager interviews across podcast, social and YouTube.
The longevity is the credential. Equity Mates has operated through multiple market cycles, a global pandemic, and a generational shift in how Australians engage with investing — and its audience has grown through all of it. When the hosts speak, their listeners know they have been paying attention for years.
5- The Lazy CEO – CEO & Founder, Showpo; Shark Tank Australia investor
The metric that matters most on social media is not followers — it is engagement, because engagement signals trust. Jane Lu, known as The Lazy CEO, maintains an engagement rate of approximately 1.15 per cent on Instagram, which is exceptional for a finance account of his size. Her 242,000-plus followers are not passive consumers: they ask questions, share experiences and apply what they read.
Her content focuses on business finance and wealth building, and the active comment sections are the clearest possible evidence that her audience does not merely scroll past.
6- Tash Invests – Founder, Tash Lends; Forbes Australia 30 Under 30
Tash Invests built her following on a premise that sounds simple but is rarer in practice than it should be: she publishes the actual numbers. Not approximations or ranges or anonymised case studies — her salary, her savings rate, her portfolio value, her net worth, updated and on the record.
Having bought her first property at twenty-two and grown her documented net worth past $1 million, she has become the primary reference point for young Australians trying to understand what building wealth on a moderate income genuinely looks like. The specificity is the product.
7- David Scutt – APAC Market Analyst at StoneX Group
The authority of most finance social media content rests on research and reading. David Scutt‘s authority rests on having done the job. A former Treasury Dealer at Arab Bank and the Commonwealth Bank, former ASX Business Supervisor, and former Global Markets Editor at Business Insider Australia and anchor at ausbiz TV, Scutt now brings that direct market experience to his role as APAC Market Analyst at StoneX Group, rather than relying on secondary commentary.
When he discusses foreign exchange movements or ASX dynamics, it is not because he has read about them. It is because he has traded them.
8- Meddy Demars – Investing & crypto content creator
The gap Meddy Demars fills is specific and underserviced: connecting global macroeconomic events to the practical reality of Australian investors. When the US Federal Reserve adjusts interest rates, when inflation data moves, when commodity prices shift — most Australian finance content either ignores the local implications or translates them poorly.
Demars, operating across TikTok and Instagram from Sydney, does the translation well: explaining what global conditions mean for Australian stocks, savings rates and investment portfolios in terms that are accessible without being condescending.
9- Simran Kaur – Founder, Friends That Invest
Friends That Invest is arguably the most successful community-building exercise in Australian personal finance, and Simran Kaur is the reason why. The New Zealand-based creator — whose audience is predominantly Australian — built a podcast, a book and a social media presence around a single insight: that the personal finance world was not speaking to young women, and that the consequences of that gap were significant.
The measurable cultural shift that followed — women engaging with investing concepts in communities that had not previously existed — is the kind of impact that most financial literacy programmes aim for and rarely achieve.
10- Effie Zahos – Money Editor at 9News
Effie Zahos is one of Australia’s most recognised financial commentators, appearing regularly across 9News, A Current Affair, Today and Today Extra as 9News Money Editor. Her role puts everyday money questions, from mortgage rates to cost-of-living pressures, in front of a national broadcast audience.
Before television, she spent years as editor of Money magazine, building the editorial foundation for her current commentary. She is also Director and Money Commentator at InvestSMART, an ambassador for Canstar, and a published author, with her financial advice available in print as well as on screen.
That combination, decades of editorial experience, an active broadcast presence, and a body of published work, is what makes her commentary carry weight beyond any single platform or post.
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