Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Tuesday, June 16, 2026. Peace broke out, oil fell, stocks cheered, and somehow the man who spent a decade selling chaos now wants a Nobel for selling calm.
Recap: Yesterday le tout-Wall Street threw itself a party because Uncle Donald declared the Iran conflict over on Truth Social, blockade lifted, Strait of Hormuz reopened toll-free, et voilà. WTI crude slid to around 85 dollars, down roughly three percent, the risk premium evaporating faster than a campaign promise. Equities ran toward the records they have been printing all spring, the S&P 500 still loitering north of 7,600, Bitcoin climbing to about 66,000 on the theory that less war is good for digital scarcity, which it may well be. The narrative being sold to itself this morning is clean: war off, inflation fear off, risk on. Who actually won here? The president gets his ceremony, the oil shorts got paid, and the rest of us get to pretend a Truth Social post is a treaty. The signing, by the way, is Friday in Switzerland. Friday is also Juneteenth, when American markets are closed. So the deal everyone is trading gets inked on the one day nobody here can trade it. But everyone is pretending not to notice.
And the part the room is really stepping around: the Fed. This is Kevin Warsh's first FOMC, gavel in hand after a 54 to 45 confirmation, and the same crowd that begged for Powell's head now wants the new hawk to cut. He will not. Rates hold at 3.50 to 3.75, futures price exactly zero cuts this year, and the 10-year yield sits at 4.46, unbothered, the skunk at the garden party. Trump installed his own chairman to get easier money and may get a man too proud to deliver it. The irony writes itself.
What's ahead: May housing starts and import-export prices before the bell, the kind of data that matters enormously until something shinier walks in, which today it will, because the real event is tomorrow's Warsh press conference and his dot plot debut. Anyone trading housing starts ahead of a brand-new Fed chair's opening monologue is, in market-speak, doing homework the night before it gets cancelled.
Levels, cleanly: gold around 4,200 and still the only adult in the room, WTI near 85, Bitcoin around 66,000, the 10-year at 4.46, and S&P futures barely green, the market holding its breath with one eye on Switzerland and the other on Warsh.
So we coast into the open on borrowed optimism and an unsigned peace, waiting for a man who has not spoken yet to tell us what he thinks. The wonderful world of finance. Have a good one, and stay sharp.