Lots of questions on the back of the recent stress we have been seeing in markets over the last few sessions
💥 Is there a banking crisis? Nope. 💵 A dollar funding crisis? Not really — at least, not yet. 🏦 Is the Fed secretly doing QE again? Also no. So… what’s actually going on? Here’s the real story 👇 After the U.S. government raised the debt ceiling in June, it started rebuilding its Treasury General Account (TGA) — basically Uncle Sam’s checking account at the Federal Reserve. The target? $850 billion. When money flows into that account, it’s pulled out of the financial system. Think of it as a liquidity drain — cash that could’ve been circulating in markets is now just… sitting there. 💧 Roughly $700 billion has been drained so far. And when that happens, bank reserves fall — which is exactly what we’re seeing today. Reserves are now sitting near multi-year lows (as a % of GDP). Less liquidity = more pressure in dollar funding markets. We can actually see that stress: ➡️ SOFR (the Secured Overnight Financing Rate — basically what banks pay to borrow short-term dollars) has ticked higher. Is it panic time? Not really. The current move is small compared to the September 2019 Repo Crisis, when the entire funding market froze and the Fed had to pivot hard from QT to QE overnight. So no, there’s no crisis — but there is a tightening squeeze in the plumbing of the financial system. Source: Tomas @TomasOnMarkets
Yesterday was day 35 of the government shutdown, tying it for the longest ever.
Source: Ryan Detrick
Interesting divergence between $NVDA Nvidia and $BTC Bitcoin
Will Nvidia stock price action follow the step of the number 1 cryptocurrency ? Source: The Market Ear
Here are some long-term Fibonacci levels in the S&P500
Source: J-C Parets
For the K-shapers...
Source: BofA, Sam Ro 📈 @SamRo BofA
🦔 Layoffs are back — and they’re bigger than you think.
Through September, U.S. companies cut nearly 950,000 jobs — the highest year-to-date total since 2020 and worse than any full year since the Great Recession (excluding COVID). October alone brought headlines: 💻 Amazon – 14,000 corporate roles gone (AI cited as a factor) 🏪 Target – 1,800 jobs cut ☕ Starbucks – 900 employees laid off 🎬 Paramount – 1,000 roles eliminated Even Southwest Airlines announced its first major layoffs ever. Government jobs made up ~300,000 of those cuts, but tech and retail are taking the brunt. “We’re not just in a low hire, low fire environment anymore. We’re firing.” – Dan North, Allianz Trade The new pattern? AI is accelerating restructuring. 60%+ of executives on LinkedIn say AI will replace entry-level tasks. Companies are trimming labor to protect profits amid tariffs and cost pressures. Job security is no longer guaranteed — even in stable sectors. Source: zerohedge, Bloomberg
🔥 “We’ve entered the AI virtuous cycle.” — Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA (CNBC)
At the APEC CEO Summit in South Korea, Jensen Huang painted a powerful picture of what’s happening in AI right now — and why growth might only accelerate from here. He explained it simply: “The AIs get better. More people use it. More people use it — it makes more profit. More profit creates more factories. More factories create better AIs. And the cycle repeats.” That’s the AI virtuous cycle — a self-reinforcing loop driving innovation, usage, and investment at record speed. 💡 The result? Smarter models → More adoption → Bigger profits → Massive infrastructure buildouts → Even smarter models. It’s not just hype, it’s momentum. Big Tech is pouring billions into AI infrastructure, fueling this cycle and redefining how fast industries evolve. Source: CNBC
Three nations control the global fleet - Greece in 1st place
Source: Voronoi app by Visual Capitalist
