Crude jumped five percent yesterday on a naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, and the S&P 500 closed down 0.06%.
Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Tuesday, August 11, 2026.
Six hundredths. The index finished at 7,753.11, roughly where it sat a week ago when it first closed above 7,700 and le tout-Wall Street decided this was a milestone worth nine hundred Dow points. Meanwhile WTI settled at $82.13 and Brent at $87.72, both up about 5%, because Iran keeps shooting at tankers, Washington keeps running a naval blockade, and Tehran has just handed its top security job to a former Revolutionary Guard commander who is, by all accounts, not a dove. The bond market at least had the decency to react. The 10-year backed up to 4.73%, the highest this month, on the radical theory that oil at eighty-two dollars does not make an inflation problem smaller.
And here is the part everyone is pretending not to notice. Friday's payroll report showed the economy shed 23,000 jobs against expectations of eighty thousand and change. Wall Street read this as good news, because a shrinking labor market takes a September rate hike off the table, and yes, you read that correctly, the live debate among the wise men of the committee is about hiking. The unemployment rate fell to 4.1 percent. It fell because participation dropped to 61.4 percent, a five-year low. Translation: fewer people count as unemployed because fewer people count at all. Who actually won here?
Today is quiet by design, the market holding its breath before July CPI at 8:30 tomorrow, where consensus wants 0.1 percent on the month and 3.4 percent on the year, down from 3.9. That forecast was assembled before crude went vertical, but never mind. Cardinal Health ($CAH) and Sea Limited ($SE) report before the bell, and after it CoreWeave ($CRWV) and Super Micro Computer ($SMCI), the two purest expressions of the proposition that if you spend enough on GPUs the margin eventually shows up. Someone will ask about capex. Someone will answer that the demand environment remains robust.
Gold is north of $4,400, call it $4,430 and moving while you read this, propped up by central banks that hoovered 289 tonnes in the second quarter, the biggest three-month haul since 2024. Bitcoin is around $64,000, less than half its October peak, and its loudest corporate believer, Strategy ($MSTR), spent last week quietly selling 1,690 coins. Digital gold, apparently, but only the digital part. S&P futures are up a tenth at roughly 7,772, the 10-year at 4.73 percent, WTI hovering near $82.
An index at record highs, an economy losing jobs, and a war risk premium nobody wants to underwrite. The wonderful world of finance. See you tomorrow.