with us on this thursday morning. morning joe starts right now. as you know, i can t talk about the particulars of this or any other ongoing criminal matter. as i said when i pointed mr. smith, i did so because it underscores the justice department s commitment to both independence and accountability. mr. smith is a veteran career prosecutor. he has assembled a group of experienced and talented prosecutors and agents who share his commitment to integrity and the rule of law. any questions about this matter will have to be answered by their filings in court. attorney general merrick gar garland with brief words for the first time since donald trump s federal indictment. is it just me or, willie, are we starting to see again not a complete breaking of ice but sort of more thawing of ice, mike pence day one, this is horrible. day two, it s bad, but i m going to pardon him. day three, too early to talk about pardons. because you know, the news came out and i m sure mike p
you know. this will wake up the kids. come on, kids. thank you. steve. where are we going? let s start with your first chart, fed pauses the hikes, signals more what? there s a lot of red squiggles, there s blue squiggles, oh, yeah, right. okay, anyway, so the fed increased interest rates, tenth consecutive meeting it s done that. i don t think it ever did that before, and you can see the pace of increases compared to all the other previous tightening cycles for the last 40 years, this has been the steepest, the fastest because we obviously know that we have an inflation problem and we have to deal with it. as you said, mika you used both the words skip and and it was interesting because jay powell also used the words skip but said pause because he did not want to commit himself to another interest rate increase but did go from 5% to 5.5% end