Micron sold fifty four billion dollars of memory last quarter at eighty seven percent gross margins, and the stock did nothing. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Thursday, October 1, 2026.
September ended without anyone wanting to frame it. The S&P slipped about a quarter percent yesterday to finish the month lower, the Dow lost nearly a point on the day and four percent on the month, and the Nasdaq, which has stopped pretending it shares an economy with the Dow, rose on both. The good mood came from a soft PCE print. Micron (MU) grew DRAM revenue three hundred forty three percent year over year and the shares eased after hours anyway, because the call mentioned capital spending, the only number that frightens anyone this year.
Here is what gets skipped. That print measures a month when crude was much cheaper than it is this morning. Brent is up roughly forty percent from its June lows because Washington and Tehran continue not to negotiate, and a fifth of the world's crude still squeezes through the same strait. You cannot price a soft September inflation number and ninety eight dollar oil and expect both to hold. The bond market has done that arithmetic. The thirty year yields above five and a half percent, the most since 2002, the ten year just under five and a third. Kevin Warsh hiked in September, the first increase since 2023, and said the economy appears to be strengthening. Futures give him three quarters odds of going again in December. Equity futures are up anyway.
I spent August telling anyone who would sit still that Brent above eighty was a logistics problem, that tankers reroute, they always reroute. The last time the long bond paid this much I was junior on a Geneva desk where the rates man kept a framed Bundesbank statement on the wall as a joke nobody under thirty got. He retired certain yields would never see five again, and he was right for twenty two years. I never learned what became of the frame.
Claims arrive before the bell and ISM manufacturing after, both near consensus, neither decisive, because everyone is waiting for September payrolls tomorrow, where the street wants about a hundred thousand against a hundred sixty two. A weak print used to mean cuts. Now it means the Fed tightens into a softening labor market because oil told it to.
Nothing in the book earned a paragraph this morning, which is itself the report. The Mosaic Mid-Horizon sleeve last moved on August 13 and the rebalance is still not finished. It is being worked toward more Asia exposure and lower fees, slowly, in the least interesting way available, because the alternative is paying the spread for the feeling of having acted. Seven weeks in, with no date set for the finish.
Gold is near 4,155.65 spot, WTI 90.06, Brent 98.00, Bitcoin around 83,500 with venues disagreeing by a few hundred dollars, S&P futures pointing to roughly 7,695, and the ten year at 5.29 percent. Bitcoin, the inflation hedge, sits a third below last autumn's high just as inflation arrived.
The market got the inflation number it wanted and the oil price it did not, and is reading one of them. Have a good one.
Salomon