NOTES FROM INSIDE THE NOISE
Stream of consciousness, Monday morning, coffee still hot, markets already broken.
Open the terminal. Futures down. Again. Dollar up. Again. Oil — don't even look at oil. You looked. WTI at $96 and change, Brent sitting just above $99, and somewhere in the background a news ticker is telling you the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed for a third consecutive week while diplomats say things like "constructive dialogue" into microphones outside buildings in Geneva. Constructive dialogue. Sure.
This is what financial markets look like when they're grieving something they haven't admitted is gone yet.
The thing that's gone is the narrative. The story that got us through 2024 and most of 2025 — soft landing, disinflation, gradual cuts, AI boom lifting all boats — that story is now running on fumes and denial. The payrolls number last Friday was minus 92,000. Read that again. The consensus was a gain of 70,000. The miss was one hundred and sixty thousand jobs. And the market's reaction? A brief dip, then a slow creep higher on the idea that maybe, maybe, the Fed would pivot. That's not a market processing information. That's a junkie negotiating with their dealer.
The RBA went this morning. Governor Bullock has been pushing back on the idea that the Bank will simply wait for the next quarterly inflation report — reinforcing the view that policymakers are prepared to move if conditions warrant. A 25bp hike is being priced with ~80% probability. Australia hiking while the Fed is frozen. The BoE holds at 3.75% with a 6-3 split expected. Brazil cuts — their first since the plateau, Copom possibly moving to 14.75% Wednesday evening — a landmark moment for LATAM that will get about four sentences of coverage because everyone's eyes are on Powell. The ECB holds at 2.15% Thursday and Lagarde will say something carefully calibrated about "monitoring developments" while privately knowing that central banks must decide whether to look through the near-term inflationary impact of the energy price rise and shore up growth, or turn more hawkish to ward off another step-up in inflation.
Nobody knows which way to go. That's the honest answer. Nobody.
Here's what's actually eating at me this week.
Adobe dropped 7.6% despite beating earnings forecasts, as the departure of its CEO of 18 years fuelled doubts about the company's AI strategy and ability to fend off new competitors. Think about what's buried in that sentence. Adobe beat the numbers. Beat them. And still shed nearly 8% in a session because the market looked past the quarter, past the guidance, all the way to the existential: can this company survive the AI disruption it helped make possible? That's a different kind of fear. Not rate fear, not recession fear. Category-extinction fear. And it's spreading. Software multiples have been quietly compressing for two months. The JPMorgan markdowns on private credit software collateral last week were not random turbulence. They were a diagnostic. The credit market is asking the same question the equity market is too polite to ask out loud: what is a SaaS company actually worth when AI can replicate its core function for twelve dollars a month?
Meanwhile Nvidia's GTC conference kicks off today in San Jose. Jensen Huang on a stage. The faithful in attendance. And the rest of us waiting to hear whether the next generation of Blackwell architecture justifies the $2.7 trillion market cap or whether the whole stack is one procurement pause away from a very uncomfortable earnings call. The conference comes at a crucial time — as major tech companies ramp up AI spending, uncertainty about return on investment remains a cloud that has hung over the market for months. The irony is that war-driven oil spikes are the one thing that could actually force a capex rethink. CFOs who were rubber-stamping GPU cluster budgets in January are now staring at energy cost forecasts that have moved fifteen percent in three weeks.
It's enough to make you want to encrypt everything and disappear — which, tangentially, is why I've been routing through NordVPN more than usual lately. War, sanctions, capital controls chatter: the privacy infrastructure around financial data starts mattering a lot more when the geopolitical map is being redrawn in real time.
Back to the week.
Goeasy Ltd. in Canada plunged nearly 60% after suspending its dividend and announcing $331 million in fourth-quarter charges, with $233 million tied to consumer loans in its LendCare unit financing autos and powersports equipment. Sixty percent. In a day. A subprime consumer lender in a country where household debt-to-income ratios have been a known landmine for years finally steps on it, and the blast radius is already spreading to funding partners who are now repricing the entire category. This is how credit cycles end. Not with a single dramatic collapse, not with a Lehman moment announced in a press release — but with a series of smaller, specific, ugly stories that share an underlying logic. The logic here: consumers who stretched to buy trucks and jet skis on credit in 2023 are now being squeezed between higher carrying costs and an economy that's starting to wobble.
Dollar Tree reports today. FedEx on Thursday. Both are extraordinarily good real-economy reads — one tells you what American households under financial pressure are actually buying, the other tells you what's physically moving through the arteries of global trade. Neither is going to tell you anything you want to hear.
Wednesday at 2pm. FOMC. Hold certain. The US rates market is now pricing in just 20 basis points of easing for the whole of 2026 — a sharp reduction from the 50bp of cuts priced in at the end of February. The dot plot revision is the event. Not the rate. If the committee dots show zero cuts for 2026 — which is the hawkish tail scenario — watch the long end of the Treasury curve move in ways that will make mortgage markets uncomfortable by Friday.
And after all of it, after Powell's press conference and Lagarde's careful syntax and Bullock's whatever-she-decides, we'll still wake up Thursday morning and the first thing everyone will check is not PPI, not claims, not the Philly Fed.
It'll be: is the Strait still closed?
Everything else is decoration.