In testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, Fed Chair Powell on Wednesday assured lawmakers that despite the state of geopolitics at the moment, the central bank is still “poised to lift interest rates at its meeting this month” in an effort to ease high inflation - NYTimes and Bloomberg and WSJ

That stay-the-course approach helped inject some stability into markets (for a day, at least), and all three major U.S. indices pared early-in-the-week losses with a strong performance yesterday - NYTimes and WSJ and MarketWatch

Oil prices hit an 8-year high this week, nearly reaching $114/barrel, thanks to the crisis in Ukraine, but the OPEC+ nations made clear at their monthly meeting that they have no appetite for increasing production to “cool down prices.” Russia, we should note, is an OPEC+ member, and its deputy prime minister “is a co-chair of OPEC Plus” - NYTimes and WSJ

A diverse group of state AGs—including Massachusetts, Nebraska, and California—has opened a probe “into TikTok and potential harms that the popular social media app may pose to younger users.” In particular, the investigation is centering on “how TikTok may have tried to boost engagement and keep young users hooked to the app” - NYTimes and Bloomberg and WSJ and Law360

While ultimately keeping its growing EV operations in-house, Ford announced this week that it will segregate that unit from its combustion engine business as part of a company-wide reorg that it hopes will “scale up the automaker’s EV offerings and develop software and connected-vehicle technology” - Bloomberg and WSJ and TechCrunch

Amazon’s shuttering more than 50 of its brick-and-mortar retail experiment stores, “including two dozen bookstores and more than 30 Amazon 4-Star stores selling general merchandise.” The closures shed “businesses that failed to gain traction for the internet giant, which has tried for years to compete in brick-and-mortar retail without finding a breakthrough hit” - NYTimes and WSJ and MarketWatch and TechCrunch

A group of Senators is wisely seeking further explanation from Treasury Secretary Yellen about how her department “plans to get cryptocurrency companies and other digital-asset middlemen to do their part in enforcing economic sanctions against Russia”—all part of the larger questions we’ve been kicking around here about whether Russia can use cryptos to side-step the recent waves of Western economic sanctions - NYTimes and Law360 and HuffPost

The SEC is zeroing in on NFT creators and crypto exchanges where those tokens trade as part of a new investigation into whether “some of the assets run afoul of the agency’s rules” - Bloomberg

Locked in the throes of what feels like a never-ending winter here in the North as we are, you’ll forgive our need for this gravel garden tutorial based largely on the verdant pictures alone - NYTimes

Stay safe and get boosted,

MDR