Welcome to the latest edition of top stock market highlights. US Federal Reserve After hiking interest rates continuously for the past 15 months, the US Federal Reserve (“Fed”) appears to be taking a breather. The 18-member committee was unanimous in its decision to keep interest rates at their current level of between 5% to 5.25%. Lest you start breathing a sigh of relief, new forecasts from the US central bank show borrowing costs rising to 5.6% by the end of this year. In other words, the rate hike cycle is still far from over as the US inflation rate is still more than double that of the Fed’s 2% target. Rates are kept constant this round so that the central bank can continue to assess incoming economic data to determine its implications for future monetary policy. Around two-thirds of the policymakers believe that rates should end in 2023 in the range of 5.5% to 5.75%, implying that most of the members believe that further monetary tightening is...