SoftBank's five-year credit default swaps are the widest since 2022, and on Friday the equity market decided the AI trade was fine again. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Monday, November 9, 2026.
Last week was the worst for the S&P 500 since the April 2025 tariff crash, down nearly three percent, most of it in one Thursday session where the index dropped more than four percent because a midterm result made people wonder who will permit all these data centers. Friday took back a third of a percent, chips rebounded, Asia followed overnight, futures up a little. The agreed word is stabilization.
Then payrolls. 165,000 jobs against expectations in the low sixties, unemployment at 4.1%, December hike odds from about seventy to about eighty percent. A hike. This committee last raised in September, its first in three years, and Kevin Warsh has said since August that inflation is too high and the Fed has work to do. The market heard him, repriced in an afternoon, and went back to buying semiconductors.
Here is what nobody wants on the screen. The AI drawdown is not an equity story, it is a funding story, and the funding market has not healed the way the tape has. Global corporate spreads hit roughly 130 basis points late last month, widest since spring 2025. CoreWeave ($CRWV) paper is reported trading at mid-teens yields. A half-billion-dollar book of data center loans, one attached to a Stargate project, is up for auction, and new deals are being shelved until things calm down. Syndicate desks insist the widening is a supply problem, nothing to do with default risk. They are usually right about that.
I spent Saturday reading a piece making that case, then arguing it with a colleague twelve years younger who keeps a 2007 chart on his second monitor like a devotional object. His line: equities topped that October while the subprime indices had been in pieces since February, therefore credit leads, therefore sell. Mine: the mortgage machine was levered eight ways through the banking system, and a hyperscaler bond is a hyperscaler bond, held by whoever wanted one. We got nowhere. He is probably more right than I would like.
Today offers wholesale inventories and Constellation Energy ($CEG). The real event is tomorrow at 8:30, October CPI, with the Cleveland Fed nowcast near 3.7% headline. Nothing before then moves on anything but positioning.
On our own book, no single trade earns the paragraph today, which is itself worth saying. The Mosaic Mid-Horizon sleeve is shaped as it has been: a bit over a third in the plain S&P tracker ($VOO), eight percent each to momentum, small-cap value and quality, six percent each to developed international, gold ($GLDM) and Israel, five percent apiece to semis ($SOXX), energy ($XLE), Asia and international small-value. Eleven lines, and not one of them an opinion about this week.
Levels, with gold quotes fifty dollars apart depending on the source: gold around $4,100, WTI near $90.50, Brent still unable to clear $100, Bitcoin about $74,000 and its weakest since August, S&P futures around 7,420, the ten-year near 4.86%, forty-odd basis points below its October high while the same market prices a hike.
The tape bounced on Friday. The loan book went to auction.
Stay sharp. Salomon