By Monday, the question on every trading desk wasn’t whether the Fed would cut rates in ten days. Futures markets were already pricing that at a probability approaching certainty. The real question was how the market should position for a Fed that everyone now expected to move for reasons that looke
Friday’s jobs report didn’t just miss. It rewrote the story of the year in one release — 22,000 jobs added in August against expectations for 76,500, and buried in the revisions, a finding that hadn’t happened since the depths of the pandemic: the US economy actually lost 13,000 jobs in June.
Tuesday’s ISM manufacturing survey landed at 48.7, a hair below the 49.0 economists expected, marking the sector’s sixth straight month below the line that separates growth from contraction — and the dollar, already down roughly 10 percent for the year, weakened further within minutes of the release
Eleven judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit spent the summer deciding a question that touched nearly every price tag in the country, and on Friday they answered it: 7-4, the tariffs Trump imposed under a 1977 emergency-powers law were not authorized by that law.
By Thursday, markets were positioning for two entirely different Federal Reserve stories landing within twenty-four hours of each other — Jerome Powell’s marquee Jackson Hole speech, due Friday morning, and the still-unresolved fight over whether Lisa Cook would still hold her seat by the time he ga
Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte had sent his criminal referral against Fed Governor Lisa Cook to the Attorney General on August 15. He didn’t release it publicly until Wednesday, five days later — and Trump posted “Cook must resign, now!!!” within thirty minutes of it hitting soci
A day after eight European leaders crowded into the White House alongside Zelensky, the number that mattered most wasn’t a troop count or a border line — it was a purchase order. Ukraine offered to buy $90 to $100 billion of American weapons and equipment, financed through its European partners, in
Tuesday’s inflation report gave the Fed exactly what it needed to justify what markets had already priced as inevitable — a cooler-than-expected CPI print pushed the odds of a September rate cut toward certainty, and by Wednesday, stocks were setting records while volatility measures kept falling.
One week after Trump fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner for publishing a July jobs report he didn’t like, the fallout wasn’t really about July anymore. It was about every number the agency publishes next.
Wednesday morning, Trump signed an executive order that had nothing to do with trade deficits or fentanyl — it accused India, by name, of “directly or indirectly importing” Russian oil, and used that finding to double the country’s tariff rate to 50 percent, among the highest the US has placed on an
Late Thursday, hours before his own self-imposed deadline, Trump signed Executive Order 14326, setting final country-specific tariff rates from 10 to 41 percent for dozens of trading partners — effective not Friday, but one week later, August 7, the same one-week grace period he’d already given Japa
By Tuesday, the market was holding its breath for two binary events in three days — a Federal Reserve decision Wednesday and a tariff deadline Friday — and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent used the pause to lower expectations rather than raise them.
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