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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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