Jan 23, 2026 · 6 min read
Friday capped one of the more information-dense weeks of the young year — a Supreme Court argument over Fed governance, a synthetic inflation data patch, and continued earnings season, all landing within five trading days — and institutional desks spent the session doing something markets rarely do
Jan 22, 2026 · 6 min read
Thursday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its delayed October and November PCE inflation report — the Fed’s actual preferred inflation gauge, arriving nearly three months late, patched together using a technique that quietly became this cycle’s defining data-integrity story: estimating Octo
Jan 21, 2026 · 6 min read
Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Cook — the case testing whether a president can remove a sitting Federal Reserve governor over allegations that predate her appointment and remain formally unresolved, a full five months after the administration first tried to fire her.
Jan 20, 2026 · 6 min read
Tuesday, institutional desks entered a week carrying two entirely separate, high-stakes events on the calendar within 48 hours of each other: Wednesday’s Supreme Court oral argument in the Trump administration’s attempt to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook, and a delayed inflation report due Thursday that
Jan 16, 2026 · 6 min read
By the third week of January, with Trump’s decision on Powell’s successor still unannounced and the January FOMC meeting less than two weeks away, speculation over who would eventually lead the Fed after May had become its own tradable market variable — currency and gold desks were pricing candidate
Jan 15, 2026 · 6 min read
By mid-January, the Supreme Court’s ruling on the legality of the IEEPA tariffs — argued back in early November, covering both the Federal Circuit’s narrower finding and the D.C. District Court’s broader one — still hadn’t arrived, leaving every business that had spent a full year building supply ch
Jan 14, 2026 · 6 min read
Wednesday, the country’s largest banks kicked off fourth-quarter earnings season — traditionally the first genuine, ground-level read on how the broader economy actually performed, arriving weeks before most other companies report and carrying outsized weight for exactly that reason.
Jan 13, 2026 · 6 min read
Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released December’s Consumer Price Index — the first inflation reading of the new year, and the first one in months not directly distorted by the shutdown’s data collection gap, landing at 2.7 percent annual headline inflation.
Jan 9, 2026 · 6 min read
Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics closed the book on 2025’s labor market: just 50,000 jobs added in December, capping a year that produced only 584,000 total, the weakest annual hiring pace since the pandemic year of 2020 and the second-weakest since the 2009 financial crisis.
Jan 8, 2026 · 6 min read
By Thursday, five trading days into the new year, institutional desks were still visibly split on how to position around the Venezuela developments — some treating the regime change as a durable geopolitical risk reduction worth pricing into energy portfolios for months, others treating it as a shor
Jan 7, 2026 · 5 min read
Wednesday, US forces boarded and seized two more vessels tied to Venezuela’s sanctioned oil trade — the Russian-flagged tanker Marinera in the Atlantic near Iceland, and the Panama-flagged M Sophia in the Caribbean — expanding an interdiction campaign that had already claimed the tanker Skipper week
Jan 5, 2026 · 6 min read
Monday, oil markets opened absorbing a weekend most traders hadn’t fully priced: US special forces had captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas early Saturday, following airstrikes around the capital, ending a Venezuelan blockade that had spent three months building toward exactly this kind of outcome.
