The Fed Holds, Big Tech Earns, and Someone Brought a Shotgun to the Press Dinner — Markets Are Shrugging

Let's do a quick vibe check on markets this week: the FOMC meets Wednesday and is expected to hold rates steady — no cuts, no drama, no dot plot update. The real show? Whether Kevin Warsh gets confirmed as Fed Chair after Senate Banking Committee votes, effectively putting a 'vacancy' sign on Jerome Powell's door. Powell has said he's not leaving until an investigation wraps with 'transparency,' which is a very polite way of saying this is going to be a whole thing.

Meanwhile, five of the Magnificent Seven are reporting earnings this week. $MSFT needs to show Azure closing the gap on Google Cloud — it trailed by a 10 percentage point spread last quarter (38% vs. 48%). $GOOG's cloud unit is targeting near-50% growth, powered by new TPU chips and a 3.5 gigawatt infrastructure deal. And $META is just out here printing, probably.

The wildcard macro signal nobody's talking about loudly enough: China's 10-year sovereign bond yield is now below the US, UK, Japan, AND Germany simultaneously — the first time in at least 20 years. Money is quietly rotating toward Chinese bonds while Western yields stay elevated under debt pressure. The US is sitting at 4.3%, the UK at a spicy 5%. That divergence isn't a blip — it's a flashing yellow light on the global capital flows dashboard.

Oh, and someone traveled from California by train with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives to a hotel where the entire U.S. line of succession was standing in a ballroom. Markets opened Monday morning anyway. That's either resilience or collective denial, and honestly, at this point, who can tell the difference.