Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Monday, July 13th. The ceasefire held all weekend, right up until the moment both sides started shooting again, and Wall Street has decided this is bullish.
Let me set the scene. Friday closed green, everyone patting themselves on the back before the long march of earnings season, and then the weekend arrived with its usual gift. The US and Iran, having signed a ceasefire that the leader of the free world personally blessed as historic, spent Saturday and Sunday trading strikes. Peace, meaning the same war with better press releases. And yet, look at the tape. Oil is not screaming. West Texas crude sits around 71 dollars, roughly where it sat before anyone reached for a missile, because le tout-Wall Street has decided that Middle East violence is now a subscription service you simply learn to ignore. Gold, the supposed panic asset, is down more than one percent near 4,064 dollars. Bombs fly, the canary keeps singing, and nobody asks why.
So who actually won? The banks, probably, which report tomorrow. JPMorgan ($JPM), Bank of America ($BAC), Wells Fargo ($WFC), Goldman Sachs ($GS) and Citigroup ($C) all march out on the same morning the June inflation print lands, because scheduling a firehose of numbers at 8:30 is apparently the new risk management. Consensus wants headline CPI around 3.8 percent, down from 4.2, and this is being sold to us as cooling. Translation: prices are rising slightly less insanely than before, and we are meant to applaud.
Bitcoin, the future of money, the inflation hedge, the digital gold, is changing hands somewhere near 63,000 dollars after starting the year above 93,000. A twenty-something percent haircut in six months, and the wonderful world of finance has simply stopped mentioning it, the way you stop mentioning a relative who lost the family fortune at the tables. The 10-year yield sits around 4.47 percent, broadly flat, waiting like the rest of us.
What is ahead today? Almost nothing, which is the point. Monday is the throat-clearing before Tuesday does all the talking. CPI, the banks, and Fed Chair Warsh heading to Congress on Wednesday to explain, with a straight face, why everything is fine. S&P futures are hovering near flat, a touch soft, the market holding its breath and pretending it is calm.
So enjoy the quiet. By tomorrow at 8:31 we will all remember why we drink the coffee black. Stay sharp, and I will see you tomorrow.