Block Party Featuring Recessionary Headwinds (NASDAQ: SQ - $49.59)

A lot of economic headlines flowed in on the tape this past week. We received CPI, PPI, retail sales, MBA Mortgage Applications, Initial Jobless Claims, and Business Inventories. It has been quite a busy week for those parsing through the data looking for signs of life in this economy.

As these figures are coming out, analysts remain adamant about the Federal Reserve keeping rates steady at 5.25-5.50%. Though predicting the direction the coalition of Jerome Powell and friends will take rates isn’t the most useful of tasks, building a scenario-based model given the current information available, a.k.a. mosaic analysis, can help us better understand the implications of higher rates for longer.

To emphatically sound like a broken record, the debt markets will be experiencing challenges throughout the next year or two as many companies have postponed capital r…