Friday marked the fourth and final “quadruple witching” of 2025 — the quarterly expiration of stock options, index options, index futures, and single-stock futures all landing on the same trading session, a mechanical event that reliably produces some of the heaviest and most volatile volume of any
Thursday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics finally published the November Consumer Price Index — the first full inflation reading in over two months, arriving with an asterisk large enough to undercut its own usefulness: October’s data, lost entirely to the shutdown, would never be collected, leaving
By Friday, two days after the Fed’s third rate cut of the year, institutional desks were still unwinding positions built on a bet that had been wrong twice in a row — first that December’s cut was uncertain when it turned out closer to inevitable, then that the cut itself would read as unambiguously
Wednesday, the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark rate another quarter point, to 3.50-3.75 percent — the third cut in four months — but the vote count told the real story: three dissents, the most since 2019, split across every possible direction a committee can disagree.
By the first Friday of December, the naval buildup off Venezuela’s coast had been running for three months without a single tanker seizure — but the infrastructure for one was fully assembled: warships, aircraft, and a Treasury sanctions list already targeting the nearly 400-vessel shadow fleet that
Monday, the Federal Reserve quietly did something it had announced weeks earlier and almost nobody outside bond desks noticed: it stopped shrinking its balance sheet, ending more than three years of quantitative tightening that had pulled over $2.5 trillion out of the financial system since 2022.
Thursday, American shoppers spent a record $6.4 billion online on Thanksgiving Day itself, up more than 5 percent from a year earlier — a number retailers and analysts alike treated as an unambiguous win, the first data point in what would become the biggest online holiday shopping period ever recor
Wednesday night, Trump signed the bill ending the longest government shutdown in American history — 43 days, resolved only after eight Senate Democrats broke ranks to advance a funding measure that gave Republicans almost everything they wanted and Democrats almost nothing they’d shut the government
Wednesday, the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark rate a quarter point to 3.75-4.00 percent — its second cut of the year, and the first time since the Fed’s rate-setting committee was created in the 1930s that officials set monetary policy missing an entire month of government employment data.
Monday, gold gave back some of the most extraordinary run in its modern history — up more than 50 percent for the year, a pace that outstrips the aftermath of September 11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the pandemic combined, before pulling back more than 3 percent in a single session, its steepest
Friday morning, the S&P 500 sat two points from a record high. By market close, $2 trillion in equity value had evaporated — triggered not by an economic report or a war, but by a single social media post accusing China of trying to hold the world “captive” with its rare earth supply.
One week into the shutdown, the National Economic Council’s own director put a number on the damage: roughly $15 billion lost per week, according to Kevin Hassett, an estimate his own administration would spend the following weeks trying to reconcile with its insistence that the shutdown was Democra
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