Stock Investors: Blame Social Security for Friday's Market Drop
The stock market's performance in 2022 was terrible, and inflation was largely to blame. Higher prices took more money out of consumers' pockets, forcing them to draw down cash reserves built up during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic and weighing on demand. Companies also had to fight rising costs of production, and many weren't able to pass all of those higher costs on to their customers.
Recently, though, investors have hoped that inflation would continue to ease, and that optimism prompted a big rally in the stock market to begin 2023. However, market benchmarks fell on Friday after the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released its latest economic data on personal income and outlays, largely because the report showed an increase in the rate at which prices of goods and services are rising. Although many of the same factors that have existed over the past year continued to put upward pressure on inflation, there was a new factor at play in January's data: Social Security.
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Source Fool.com
