Stocks Fall to End a Bad Week, and a Boom Begins to Look Shaky<br />The immediate catalyst was the jobs report, which showed the strong United States economy might finally be translating<br />into rising wages for American workers — a sign that higher inflation could be around the corner.<br />Given the strength of the global economy, central banks, led by the United States Federal Reserve, have started to remove some of the supports<br />that helped supercharge stock and bond prices over the last decade.<br />Interest rates that are set every day in the global bond markets are already leaping<br />higher, in anticipation of central bank rate increases later this year.<br />On Friday, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note — a widely used gauge for overall<br />interest rates — rose to more than 2.8 percent, the highest level since early 2014.<br />Average hourly earnings for United States workers were 2.9 percent higher in January than the previous year, the fastest annual increase in years.<br />But what is really worrying investors is that the fuel behind this stock market boom,<br />namely cheap money from global central banks, may disappear sooner than they thought.<br />Their goal was to incentivize investors to put their cash to work in the economy — for example, by buying corporate stocks<br />and bonds — rather than stashing it in the relative safety of government bonds.
