Internal Monologue: Sunday Morning Market Hangover

Sunday, September 22, 2025 — 6:47 AM

Coffee's cold already. Third cup since four-thirty. Can't shake this gnawing feeling that we're all playing musical chairs with the music getting slower and fewer chairs left standing.

The Fed's 11-to-1 vote for their quarter-point cut keeps rattling around my skull. Eleven to one. When was the last time you saw that kind of consensus from a group that usually argues about the color of money? Either they're seeing something we're not, or they're whistling past a graveyard they helped dig.

Flash PMI data dropping this week, and I've got this sick intuition it's going to tell us what we already know but refuse to admit. The economy's running on fumes and hope. Corporate America's playing an elaborate shell game, moving money around balance sheets faster than three-card Monte dealers on Times Square.

Look at Goldman's Q2 numbers from July. $10.91 EPS, down from $14.12 in Q1. Their equities trading popped 36% year-over-year to $4.3 billion, which sounds great until you realize that's blood money. Volatility trading. Fear profits. When your trading desk is your growth engine, you're not building an economy—you're strip-mining it.

The April crash after Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff announcement feels like ancient history now, but the scar tissue is still there. Markets have this collective amnesia about trauma until the next shoe drops. We bounced back because we always do, until we don't.

Sunday morning clarity is the worst kind. No CNBC talking heads, no Bloomberg terminals beeping, no trading floors humming. Just silence and the realization that we've been dancing on quicksand for months. S&P 500 at 22 times forward earnings, a top 5% reading since 1985. Top five percent. We're either geniuses or idiots, and history suggests which one is more likely.

The Fed cutting into strength—or what they're calling strength—feels like a doctor prescribing painkillers for chest pain instead of checking for a heart attack. They're responding to "signs of a concerning slowdown in the U.S. labor market" with the same medicine they used when the house was actually on fire.

What happens when the real emergency hits and we're already at 4.00%-4.25%? What happens when quarter-point cuts feel like bringing a water gun to a wildfire?

Micron and AutoZone reporting Monday. Memory chips and auto parts. The real economy in two earnings calls. MU will tell us if anyone's actually building anything worth remembering, and AZO will tell us if people can afford to fix what they already own. Simple as that.

The coffee's getting colder. Markets open in thirty-four hours. September's presenting "opportunities for traders who can act decisively while remaining cautious"—which is financial advisor speak for "good luck, you're going to need it."

Decisively cautious. Like being aggressively passive or urgently patient. The contradictions pile up faster than unpaid credit card bills, and just like those bills, eventually someone has to settle the account.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this time really is different. Maybe we've solved boom and bust cycles with algorithms and derivatives and central bank omniscience. Maybe Goldman's trading desk profits represent genuine economic value creation rather than rent extraction. Maybe the Fed's surgical precision will thread the needle between recession and inflation like they did in... when exactly?

The sun's coming up. Another week begins tomorrow. Time to get back to pretending we know what we're doing while the music plays and the chairs disappear one by one.