Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Wednesday, June 17. Today the new man at the Fed finds out whether the job is as much fun as it looked when he lobbied for it.
Yesterday Wall Street did its favorite trick, selling the thing it worshipped the day before. The Dow closed up 0.64 percent while the Nasdaq dropped 1.15, because the semiconductors finally got the haircut everyone swore would never come. Nvidia ($NVDA) fell 2.4 percent, Broadcom ($AVGO) lost 4.4, Micron ($MU) more than 6, AMD ($AMD) over 7, Intel ($INTC) a charming 8.5. Profit-taking, they called it, which is market-speak for "we have no idea why we were up there either." The same crowd that bought every chip at any price on Monday discovered gravity on Tuesday and called it discipline. Meanwhile oil collapsed. Uncle Donald declared his Iran deal done, the Strait of Hormuz set to reopen, signatures to follow Friday in Switzerland of all places, and WTI cratered to roughly 80 dollars, the lowest since the war began in March. Risk-on, et voilà. Bitcoin shot back above 66,000, the leader of the free world took his victory lap, and everyone agreed peace is bullish until the next time it isn't.
Here is the part everyone is pretending not to notice. The main event today is not Donald's Nobel audition. It is Kevin Warsh chairing his very first meeting, the man installed precisely because he promised to be agreeable, now obliged to impersonate an independent central banker for exactly one afternoon. The market wants cuts. The boss who hired him wants them louder. And the dot plot, last seen in March promising two, is about to quietly tell a different story. Who actually won here? Ask again at 2pm.
Ahead, retail sales for May at 8:30, the consumer's pulse, conveniently timed so we can all ignore it. Import prices, industrial production, the homebuilders' mood ring, none of which moves a screen before Warsh speaks at 2 and faces the cameras at 2:30. The skunk at this garden party is the easing bias, expected to be quietly deleted. Translation: the free money may be on hold, and nobody wants to say it out loud.
Levels, cleanly. Gold above 4,300, still the only adult in the room. WTI near 80 and falling on a peace it cannot quite believe. Bitcoin around 66,500, delighted as ever to be anyone's mood. S&P futures near 7,540, faintly green, holding their breath. The ten-year around 4.28, the one number that actually decides whether any of this matters.
So we wait, as always, for one man to read a paragraph aloud. Powell's old chair, a new occupant, the same impossible choice. Have a good one, and keep one eye on the dots.