A half hour before the opening bell this morning, Fed Chair Jay Powell came forth with public remarks made in Stockholm, Sweden this morning. Pre-market futures traders held their breath… then Powell didn’t add anything pertinent to the narrative laid out by Fed presidents like Raphael Bostic did yesterday. Perhaps some were expecting Powell to reverse the Fed’s policy — on no news? Please.

Pre-market indices have improved slightly, anyway: ahead of the Powell speech, the Dow was -90 points, the S&P 500 -10 and the Nasdaq -45 points. Directly after the short speech concluded, the Dow went to -60 points, the S&P -5 and the Nasdaq -20. It’s still down — now for the fourth session in the past five — without many catalysts today to force market direction either way.

Bed, Bath & Beyond is trading up +10.5% this morning on a worse-than-expected fiscal Q3 reported ahead of the bell: -$3.65 per share was a deeper cut than the -$2.36 expected, on $1.26 billion in revenues that was light of the $1.38 billion in the Zacks consensus. Perhaps the stock rebounding on this dismal news is all relative: the trailing 3-quarter average was -1,638%. Is this a dead-cat meme-stock rally?

Coinbase Global (COIN Quick QuoteCOIN - Free Report) announced a second round of workforce cuts this morning: 20% this time around, as the CEO says, because of the turmoil FTX’s bankruptcy has wrought on the crypto platform market. The company is letting go around 950 workers, presumably to shore up its balance sheet (in U.S. dollars), and its CEO says we “may not have seen the end to” job cuts at the crypto base major.

A revision to wholesale inventories from November is the next economic print expected, though it’s not exactly a “heavy hitter.” That all comes Thursday — with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) report for December out ahead of the bell then. Expectations are for us to hit the lowest core year over year reads on CPI since December 2021. Tomorrow, KB Home (KBH Quick QuoteKBH - Free Report) reports earnings; Thursday it’s Taiwan Semi (TSM Quick QuoteTSM - Free Report) .