More and more, the markets are looking for a sign – any sign at all – that the Federal Reserve is ready to back off of its aggressive course of interest rate hikes. Investors are so desperate that they’ll interpret just about anything the Fed says, or even what they didn’t say, as a green light to start buying equities again.

Bond yields and the dollar are up, and practically everything that’s not “risk-free” is down: stocks, precious metals, cryptocurrency, you name it. Real estate is rolling over, and calls for a repeat of the 2008-2009 financial crisis are popping up in the mainstream media. So, is it time to panic-sell and hide under your bed for a year or two?

“Stunned” is the only way to accurately describe the sentiment on Wall Street as the highly anticipated Consumer Price Index (CPI) reading came out this morning. Just seconds before the numbers came out, the major stock market indices were firmly in the green; after the announcement, they suddenly plunged deep into the red.

It was supposed to be a new era of wind farms and solar panels replacing fossil fuels in the U.S. and globally, a time when “green and clean” power sources would eliminate the need for oil and natural gas. That was a fantasy from two years ago that is now crashing headfirst into a cold, harsh reality.

Sometimes in the game of investing, you’re given what I call a lay-up. It’s a stock, or even an entire sector of stocks, that is so obscenely undervalued that taking a long position is almost mandatory. Right now, certain semiconductor stocks fall into that category.

It’s a grim market metaphor: even a dead cat will bounce if it falls out of a tree. Applied to the financial markets, this means that a seemingly “alive” rally might just be a temporary one or a head-fake within the context of a larger bear market.

Stairs up, elevator down – that’s how the markets are supposed to function, right? The times have changed in the 2020s, however, as algorithm-based trading can make rallies happen as fast and as violently as market downturns. Are you able to change with the times, and take advantage of frustrating, unpredictable stock and commodity price moves?

So, it looks like the Federal Reserve is finally achieving what it set out to do: raise interest rates and shrink its balance sheet until something breaks. Perhaps they didn’t count on multiple things breaking at once, however, and a systemic collapse far beyond what the Fed had intended.

Is bad news good news now, or is it just bad? It’s harder than ever to navigate today’s markets as the Federal Reserve engineers an economic slowdown and vulnerable businesses capitulate – yet, the career politicians refuse to acknowledge that we’re actually in a recession.

As the stock market tests and breaks below the June lows, staggering financial losses feel sudden and painful. Yet, this event was years in the making, the final shoe dropping as one central bank policy error has led to another all to come crashing down at the worst possible time.

Buy when there’s blood on the streets – that’s how the old saying goes. Plenty of people say it, but very few of them actually do it when the blood starts to flow. That’s because acknowledging generational wisdom is quite different from controlling our emotions and acting on it.