The Room Where Nobody Agrees

A week in which the Fed minutes read like a group therapy session, Walmart confessed, and the Middle East reminded everyone what "risk-off" actually means.

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The Federal Reserve released its January meeting minutes on Wednesday and, to nobody's surprise, they said absolutely nothing with remarkable efficiency.

"Several participants" would cut rates if inflation cooperates. "Some participants" think we should sit still and wait. A few — unnamed, naturally — apparently floated the idea that more hikes might be needed if prices stay stubborn. This is the institution responsible for pricing the cost of money for the world's largest economy, and its internal debate currently resembles a philosophy seminar where everyone's read different books. The DXY hit a two-week high. The 10-year Treasury bumped to 4.09%. Markets received the minutes the way you receive a doctor who says it could be nothing, or it could be serious — with a polite nod and immediate anxiety.

And then the oil market caught fire.

Crude climbed above $66 a barrel, its highest print of 2026, after CBS reported that U.S. military assets — the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group, and a second carrier, Gerald Ford, steaming toward the region — are positioned for possible strikes on Iran as early as this weekend. Trump hasn't given the order. He's also repeatedly said he will if no deal materializes. A third of the world's waterborne crude transits the Strait of Hormuz. The market is not confused about what happens next if those ships start doing more than floating.

Energy stocks caught the bid. Banks sold off. Blackstone fell 5.4%, Apollo dropped 5.2%, and Blue Owl — which quietly sold $1.4 billion in loan assets and tightened investor liquidity provisions on Wednesday — got hit for nearly 6%. In private credit land, that kind of move isn't background noise. It's a signal. The leverage that made those asset managers look like money-printing machines during the easy-liquidity years is now the same lever that, when pulled, creates very uncomfortable knock-on questions about what else is sitting on balance sheets waiting to be marked.

Walmart reported Thursday morning. Beat on revenue. Beat on earnings — narrowly. Guided 2026 below what Wall Street wanted. The stock fell 1.4%. The reaction was almost cruelly efficient: thanks for the data point on the American consumer, see you in April. What Walmart's numbers actually said — and this deserves more attention than it got — is that spending held up, but the consumer doing the spending is increasingly value-driven, promotionally sensitive, and stretched on discretionary. The people shopping at Walmart are not the same people moving markets. But they are the majority of the country, and they are telling you something about margin pressure further up the chain that earnings multiples haven't fully digested.

Software got hit again. Salesforce, Intuit, Cadence — down between 1.3% and 2.8%. The S&P 500 software subgroup is now down roughly 20% year-to-date. The AI disruption thesis, which was an abstraction twelve months ago, is now a pricing mechanism. Investors aren't waiting for the disruption to happen; they're discounting it now, in real-time, in the share prices of companies whose revenue models assume the world still needs the same number of human-mediated software workflows it did before inference got cheap and fast.

Bitcoin sat around $67,000–$68,000 for most of the week, hovering in a consolidation range that has the texture of exhaustion rather than stability. Spot ETF flows went negative — $133 million in outflows on Wednesday alone, with BlackRock's IBIT among the products seeing net redemptions. Ethereum is flirting with the $2,000 level in a way that suggests it might not be flirting much longer. The Fear & Greed Index landed at 9. Nine. "Extreme Fear" is a technical designation, but it also captures a mood: the people who bought crypto as an inflation hedge are watching the Fed stay hawkish, the people who bought it as a geopolitical hedge are watching it sell off on geopolitical news, and everyone is quietly reconsidering the thesis.

Gold, meanwhile, is up. Gold analysts are now — without apparent irony — projecting targets between $7,000 and $10,000. You can dismiss that as extrapolation theater, or you can sit with the fact that the asset which supposedly died in 2021 has been the cleanest trade of 2026, while the asset that was supposed to replace it is struggling to hold five figures.

There are rumors — persistent, gaining texture — that Christine Lagarde may step down from the ECB before her term ends. The euro slipped below 1.18 against the dollar. European sovereign curves stayed flat, which means the market isn't panicking, but it is watching. A leadership transition at the ECB while the Fed is mid-identity-crisis and geopolitical risk in the Gulf is building would be, to use a technical term, a lot at once.

PCE data drops Friday. Q4 GDP advance estimate too. The consensus on PCE year-over-year is 2.8%. The Fed's target is 2%. The gap between those two numbers is the entire argument about what happens to rates for the rest of 2026, and everyone — the hawks, the doves, the confused moderates in the middle — is about to have fresh ammunition.

Whatever they do with it, they won't agree.

They never do.