Rate Hike?
Plus: Hegseth impeachment fails, gaming out what happens if Anthropic's IPO goes poorly, and more...
The Fed looks likely to raise rates: Yesterday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data showing that consumer prices rose again last month (0.4 percent in October after a 0.6 rise the month prior). Per The New York Times, "overall prices were around 4 percent higher compared with the same time last year, up from 3.7 percent in September. Over the same period, core prices rose about 2.8 percent." It's been years of this pattern, over and over again; it adds up over time.
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Food was a huge driver of the price increases last month. "Energy prices overall were up 0.7 percent for the month after a 5.2 percent jump in September," adds the Times, and "gasoline prices rose just 1 percent, significantly slower than the 9.1 percent increase seen in the previous period. Electricity prices rose nearly 1 percent." Diesel prices are majorly up right now as well.
Usually there's a way to slice a CPI report so that you have some kind of glimmer of good news. https://t.co/RZCxhShWtw
— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) November 10, 2026
The Federal Reserve is feeling the pressure to better tame inflation, and its meeting in December will be rather telling as to how aggressively it hopes to tackle this objective. For most of this year since the leadership shakeup—Kevin Warsh replaced Jerome Powell as chair back in May—the board has favored very gradual increases.
"The latest inflation data reinforced the idea that price pressures remain sticky and elevated and are not just due to one-off shocks," Matthew Luzzetti, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank, tells the Times. "Therefore, the Fed probably has more work to do and in order to balance the risks better, it makes sense to do that at a somewhat quicker pace than we were previously anticipating."
People who retire…die?: "I'm looking for a job, if you have any ideas," Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas), who will be replaced by Democrat James Talarico, told reporters yesterday. "People who retire die."
"Cornyn remained confident he could have kept the Senate seat red had he been on the ballot," notes The Washington Post. "Cornyn lost in a bitter primary runoff to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who lost to Talarico by 12 percentage points."
It's not clear what Cornyn, who is 74, is angling for. President?
Massie's efforts failed: Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) had hoped to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as I covered yesterday. This attempt was defeated by a 211–204 vote, as legislators referred the impeachment articles to a committee for further study—a sneaky way of making sure they don't advance.
"We put the question to Congress," Massie told reporters following his defeat. "What I found out tonight is they still haven't broken from the spell of Donald Trump. He still controls this conference."
Scenes from New York: The NYC Hospitality Alliance's quarterly survey found that "61% of restaurant operators said they had or were considering raising menu prices, and 57% reported reducing or considering reducing employee hours or staffing levels," per Gothamist. "Almost half of operators surveyed, or 45%, identified labor costs as a leading business concern. Other major issues cited were inflation and tariffs, liability insurance and commercial rents, according to the survey."
QUICK HITS
- "An underperforming Anthropic IPO has to be a very prominent player in what will be a pretty massive correction in the market with respect to AI," Jack Selby, a managing partner at Peter Thiel's family office, told Bloomberg Television. "It's so capex-intensive. It's a real business, but the business is still in its early innings, and the idea that it is a trillion-dollar business seems exceptionally far-fetched."
- Possibly one of the worst ideas of all times: "A top Biden administration economic official is pitching Democrats on a low-down-payment proposal to bring millions of new homebuyers into the market, as incoming congressional leaders take stock of affordability measures that might help them notch early legislative wins. A new policy group chaired by former National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard is pushing for the creation of a Federal Housing Administration program to facilitate home purchases with as little as $1,000 down for first-time buyers who meet 'strong underwriting criteria,' according to a copy of the proposal reviewed by Bloomberg News."
- "Forty-nine percent of U.S. adults are in favor of the death penalty for convicted murderers, and 45% are opposed," reports Gallup in new polling data released yesterday. "While statistically similar to last year's 52%, the latest update marks the first time support has been below the majority level since 1971, when it was also at 49%. The last time support was lower than now was in 1966, when a record-low 42% favored the death penalty. The high point for support was 80% in 1994."
- What does all the kid-tech get us, exactly?
"Once we had that tool," a mom of four tells @sarahzhang (the writer of this excellent piece in The Atlantic) "it felt like we were irresponsible if we didn't use it."
This is my worry with so much parenting tech (and a major theme of CITY WITHOUT CHILDREN): Are you… pic.twitter.com/2xh0GB3gE7
— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) November 10, 2026
- "A biography of Mario Vargas Llosa in Spanish has been abandoned after a publisher rejected its British author's account of the Nobel laureate's life as too critical," reports the Times. "The decision by Penguin Random House, revealed by the Spanish newspaper El País, ends a 13-year publishing arrangement for Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life, by Gerald Martin, an expert on Latin American literature whose previous biography of another literary giant, Gabriel García Márquez, was published by Penguin's Debate imprint in Spain in 2009."
