U.S. stock-market investors are looking ahead to Valentine’s Day, but not just because their hearts are filled with love. Feb. 14, this coming Wednesday, is seen as a critical day for Wall Street because it will provide further illumination on perhaps the biggest bogeyman stalking the major indexes: inflation. The recent turbulence in stocks — which resulted in major indexes suffering their biggest one-week percentage decline in about two years last week, pushing the Dow DJIA, +1.70% and S&P 500 SPX, +1.39% into correction territory — was largely sparked by the January jobs report, which showed a higher-than-expected acceleration in wage growth. That raised the question of whether investors should expect inflation to come back to the economy after years of being dormant, and whether that in turn would lead the Federal Reserve to be more aggressive in raising interest rates in an attempt to avoid the economy overheating. Recent trading — which has included a sizable recovery off the market’s lows — has largely been driven around whether inflation fears have been overblown, or whether the move lower was justified by the changing macroeconomic environment. Volatility has remained elevated, as thus far the wage-growth figure is one of the few bits of hard data that investors have had to go on about this issue.via