ANGLES.

Well, I did warn you with my closing line of last week’s recap . The biggest news story of an otherwise generally quiet weekend was that, barely a month after reaching an all-time high, Bitcoin collapsed into free-fall and erased its entire gain for the year in the latest crypto massacre. Wall Street began a week of important earnings and a long-overdue September Jobs Report in a cautious mood on...

Faced with rapidly escalating public fury aimed at all sides over the shutdown, Senate Democrats blinked first in the standoff over the weekend, allowing a procedural vote to go through on Sunday night which passed the buck over to the House and the beginning of the end finally came into view. Wall Street celebrated when markets opened on Monday morning and attention turned to exactly when the upc...

It was a light weekend for disruptive news which included no progress whatsoever in a resolution of the government shutdown, now in its second month and set to become the longest in US history. It is starting to be acutely felt by millions of Americans with more missed paychecks, food aid broken, cuts to child care kicking in, turmoil at airports and health insurance premiums spiking. Every week t...

China and the US may have reached a “substantial framework” of some kind of trade agreement, according to breadcrumbs laid over the weekend by Trump, who was scheduled to meet with Chinese premier Xi in Seoul later in the week. He teased a flurry of other Asian trade deals too and local stocks rocketed with more new all-time record highs for markets in Japan and South Korea. The devil will be in t...

There was nothing but tumbleweed over the weekend in regards to any resolution of the government shutdown. Israel resumed its deadly bombing of Gaza with the supposed peace agreement barely a week old. Statements out of Kiev and Moscow highlighted entrenched positions that appeared to make the prospect of any kind of viable deal seem rather fanciful. Coming off their best week since August, stocks...

As speculated in last week’s recap, the narrative changed abruptly over the weekend as Trump climbed down from his hostile rhetoric of the previous Friday, posting on social media “Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine!” Going full TACO , he referred to an “eternity” of time for discussions to make progress between now and his proposed 100% tariff imposition date of November 1st. On the shu...

Fourth quarters have traditionally been very kind to stock markets , with half of the past decade’s returns typically coming in Q4s. Having said that, there was precisely zero progress towards ending the US government shutdown over the weekend. It still appears to be more of an annoyance than a crisis to politicians (and to Wall Street) but the feeling was that this was likely to change if this sh...

As the end of the month and the quarter approached, Wall Street prepped over the weekend for a narrative likely to be dominated by tiresome government shutdown-related brinkmanship in Washington DC. Investors have generally been well-served by ignoring domestic politics. That was always going to be a difficult task last week. The countdown to 12:01am ET on Wednesday began on Monday with stocks sti...

Following a mostly meaningful news-free weekend, markets headed into the last full week of September, historically the worst week of the year for stock prices, with lots of Fed governor speeches lined up including from the president’s manservant Stephen Miran and chairman Powell along with a potentially spicy UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York and developing concerns about an imminent US gover...

Trump piled the pressure on the Fed over the weekend, barking that he expected a “big cut” from the central bank after their meeting on Wednesday. Market-driven expectations remained above 90% that the Fed Funds Interest Rate would be lowered by a quarter of a point, as the committee prioritizes addressing a cooling labor market even while sticky inflation complicates the picture. Traders were als...

The weekend newswires were dominated by the resignation of Japanese prime minister Ishiba after two crushing parliamentary defeats, political chaos and public disorder on the rise in the UK, France and Argentina, a brutal intensification of Russia’s assault on Ukraine and Trump’s plans to militarize the streets of Chicago and Memphis. Stocks recovered from the previous Friday’s wobble, regaining s...

Confusion reigned on Wall Street and around the world after the previous Friday’s appellate court decision confirming that IEEPA tariffs are illegal. The exchanges were closed on Monday , but the general sense in the futures market was that, while the smart money was not going to immediately freak out, it was going to have to keep a close eye on how things evolve here. There was also the small mat...

Traders came into last week breathing easier after Fed chairman Powell strongly implied the previous Friday that a Federal Funds rate cut is coming on September 17th. But there are still plenty of data releases to navigate before then, including Nvidia’s earnings on Wednesday and more inflation data on Friday. Stocks unwound some of Friday’s gains over the course of a mostly quiet summer session o...

Clarity around Ukraine failed to emerge over the weekend despite the US administration pumping out happy-clappy PR spin ahead of Trump’s meeting with Zelensky and the Europeans. The Federal Reserve began gathering in Jackson Hole for its annual boondoggle which always culminates in a closely-watched speech from the chairman. Earnings focus was set to switch to the major retailers. So Wall Street w...

Over the weekend, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) entered into an unprecedented “pay-to-play” agreement with the US government whereby they will be allowed to continue to deal with China as much as they want so long as they kick back 15% of all revenues generated there to the Treasury, making a total mockery of the idea (that Wall Street never believed anyhow) that chip export prohibitions...

Wall Street is suddenly staring at two existential questions that it never thought it would have to face; about the independence of the Federal Reserve and about the credibility of future economic data coming out of the 141 year-old Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) as both historically autonomous agencies face upcoming politicization with Trump set to insert his own hand-picked minions into highly...

The big news of the weekend was the announcement of a US/EU trade deal resulting in a 15% tariff on imports from most of mainland Europe (including on automobiles) similar to that agreed with Japan days earlier, representing the starkest example yet of TACO as it was a 50% rate that was being dangled just weeks ago. Despite lingering confusion around some particulars of the agreement and backlash...

Ahead of a big week of earnings reports including a first look at some Big Tech, it was a relatively quiet weekend on the newswires although reports did emerge that the European Union may not necessarily be willing to roll over and have its tummy tickled by the United States, supposedly preparing meaningful retaliatory trade measures in advance of tariff impositions on August 1st. Stocks opened ca...

Over the weekend we learned of Trump’s proposed 30% tariff on imports from Mexico (non- USMCA ) and the European Union, supposedly to take effect on August 1st, with not-so-veiled threats of a rate increase in the case of any retaliation. Wall Street traders’ strong confidence in the TACO narrative that I talked about in last week’s report wavered somewhat on Monday morning after the weekend’s dec...

Ahead of a risk-filled big few days in tariff-world, stock markets were jittery at the opening bell on Monday , not helped by yet another massive plunge in the price of Tesla shares on the back of Musk’s apparent dive back into politics. Things got worse for stocks as a chaotic wave of different tariff proclamations began to come out, including for Japan and South Korea which were each slapped wit...

There was yet more tariff whiplash over the weekend as the US and Canada appeared to kiss and make up after the the previous Friday’s trade squabble. Trump then turned his rage on the world’s fourth largest economy, calling Japan “very spoiled” and demanding that it buy more American rice .. or else. The deficit-exploding, multi-trillion dollar tax and spending bill (TSB) inched closer to becoming...

Over the weekend, Trump (despite having campaigned noisily just last year on a platform of US non-intervention in global military entanglements) ordered direct airstrikes on Iran which he claimed had “obliterated” the country’s nuclear capabilities (intelligence reports later cast doubt on this assertion). He also floated the idea of Iranian regime change ( “MIGA”? Really?). Unsurprisingly, oil pr...

[Note: this report was put together before Saturday evening’s US airstrikes on Iran] Financial markets were spoiled for choice about what to focus on at the kick-off of a holiday-shortened week - geopolitics, energy and shipping prices, tariffs and trade, a G-7 meeting in Canada, the tax and spending bill and multiple central bank interest rate-setting meetings around the world including at the Fe...

With temperatures rising on the streets of Los Angeles, Wall Street remained cool to start the week with attention focused on the US/China talks in London as well as the prospect of a first peek at inflation data on Wednesday and Thursday that at least partially encompasses the new tariff era. The path of least resistance for stocks is higher right now and that was the cautious direction of travel...

US/China trade tensions flared up over the weekend with both sides aggressively accusing the other of violating the Geneva agreement that is currently capping tariffs between the two countries. US manufacturing data pre-market on Monday confirmed the slowdown in the economy with both imports and exports falling sharply. One analyst described the tariff policy as “raising hell” right now among Amer...