For the last two years, the Corona Virus killed Americans on a brutal, predictable schedule: A few weeks after infections climbed so did deaths, cutting an unforgiving path across the country. But that pattern appears to have changed. Nearly three months since an ultra-contagious set of new Omicron variants launched a springtime resurgence of cases, people are nonetheless dying from COVID at a rate close to the lowest of the pandemic. The spread of the virus and the number of deaths in its wake, two measures that were once yoked together, have diverged more than ever before, epidemiologists said. Deaths have ticked up slowly in the northeastern United States, where the latest wave began, and are likely to do the same nationally as the surge pushes across the South and West. But the country remains better fortified against COVID deaths than earlier in the pandemic, scientists said.
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The recent FOMC interest rate hike campaign is not all bad news. There is a silver lining for savers. "Rising interest rates represent a turn of fortunes for savers as interest earnings are finally on the rise, and eventually those higher interest rates will help reduce inflation," Greg McBride, Bankrate's chief financial analyst, told ABC News. "This is the opposite of what savers have endured the past three years when interest rates fell and then inflation took off."
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Markets: Of the 17 times the S&P has dropped more than 15% since 1950, on 11 of those occasions stocks bottomed out only when the FOMC began to signal a loosening of monetary policy, according to an analysis by Goldman Sachs.
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