Jan. 3, the first day of U.S. market trading in 2022, looked like just another day in a stock rally that began when Barack Obama was still president. The S&P 500 hit a record high. Tesla, the company that upturned the auto industry and made many investors rich, rose 13.5% and came close to its own all-time peak.
That Monday, it turned out, was actually the end of a market that for more than a decade had gone mostly in one direction, with the S&P 500 rising more than 600% since March 2009.
Just two days later, the Federal Reserve released the minutes from its previous meeting — a typically routine event on Wall Street — revealing that policymakers at the central bank were so worried about inflation that they thought they might need to accelerate how fast they raised interest rates.