The economy is sending two signals at once. The Fed is listening to the louder one.
Payrolls fell. Retail sales fell. Inflation held at 3.4%. And three Federal Reserve officials voted to raise interest rates. Here is how those facts fit together.
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Wealth Signal
Editorial · Markets, economics, personal finance
Wealth Signal is written and maintained by one person. Work is published under the masthead rather than under individual bylines, because a single operator inventing a newsroom of colleagues would be the first thing on this site you could not check.
Published work
Aug 17, 2026
Aug 17, 2026
Why small caps hit a record on the day the S&P 500 fell
On Friday the Russell 2000 closed at an all-time high while the three big indices finished lower. The explanation is not that investors turned bullish on small companies.
Aug 17, 2026
What a $5.45 trillion price tag actually assumes about NVIDIA
The most common argument about NVIDIA is whether it is expensive. That is the wrong question. Here is the arithmetic of what the market is currently paying for — with every assumption disclosed.
Aug 17, 2026
Before you buy NVIDIA ahead of August 26
Nine days before the most-watched earnings report on the calendar, here is what an investor should understand about the business — and what the report can and cannot tell you.
Aug 16, 2026
Everyone agrees earnings are booming. Here is the strongest case that they aren't.
S&P 500 companies grew earnings more than 50% last quarter and 86% beat expectations. Both facts are true. Neither means what the headline suggests.
Aug 16, 2026
24.6%
Inflation is 3.4%. Gasoline is up 24.6% over the same twelve months. That gap explains almost every argument about the economy right now.
Aug 16, 2026
$10,000 a year ago: bitcoin, gold, and the part return charts never show
One of these turned $10,000 into $13,115. The other turned it into $5,310. The interesting question is not which — it's what you would have had to endure to still be holding.
Aug 15, 2026
Market Autopsy: how Silicon Valley Bank died in 44 hours
A bank with $200bn in assets failed in less than two days. The cause was not fraud, and it was not a bad loan book. It was a duration mismatch, a badly sequenced announcement, and a group chat.
Aug 16, 2026
The Fed's rate is 3.5%. Your mortgage is 6.67%. Here's what sits in between.
Mortgage rates have barely moved in a year despite a policy rate well below them. Understanding the gap explains why waiting for the Fed to fix your housing payment is a strategy with a flaw in it.
Aug 15, 2026
What 3.4% inflation actually does to money sitting in a savings account
The arithmetic is simple, rarely done, and slightly uncomfortable. Here it is, with every assumption shown.
Sep 14, 2026
$10,000 in NVIDIA in 2014 is $5.4 million. The interesting number is the $523,236 you had to watch disappear.
The return is the least useful fact about this trade. What decided whether you collected it was a ten-month stretch in 2022 when your position fell by 63% — and you were still up thirty-fold while it happened.