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.
Jan 2, 2026 · 5 min read
Friday, the first trading session of 2026, opened with every major uncertainty from the prior year still fully intact — a tariff case pending before the Supreme Court, a Fed chair search underway, a currency that had just posted its worst year in decades, and a government funded only through the end
Jan 1, 2026 · 6 min read
New Year’s Day arrived with markets closed and the country’s fiscal ledger exactly where 2025 left it — a national debt north of $38 trillion, a fourth quarter distorted by a 43-day shutdown, and a Federal Reserve heading into 2026 without a permanent chair for the second half of the year.
Dec 31, 2025 · 6 min read
Sunday, with three days left in the year, PDVSA began shutting down producing wells across the Orinoco Belt — the last resort for a state oil company that had run out of places to put crude it could no longer reliably export past a US naval blockade.
Dec 25, 2025 · 5 min read
Christmas morning brought no ceasefire to the slow-motion blockade sitting off Venezuela’s coast — by December 24, only two tankers carrying PDVSA crude had even attempted to reach international waters, and one of those two had already been intercepted.
Dec 24, 2025 · 6 min read
Christmas Eve brought the customary half-day of thin, holiday-shortened trading — but the number that mattered for the year had already been set well before Wall Street’s early close: the dollar index was on pace to finish 2025 down roughly 10 percent, one of its worst annual performances in decades
