Nasdaq futures are up on a summit three days away whose AI agenda explicitly leaves out the export controls that actually bind. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Monday, September 21, 2026.
Friday closed the S&P just over 7,650, up a sixth of a percent, enough to leave the week down only a tenth. The Dow had a worse time and finished its third losing week in a row. This morning is cheerful: futures up about six tenths, Nasdaq contracts better, crude lower for a fourth straight session as Hormuz shipments reach a six-month high, and the 10-year easing off the five percent it sat on Friday.
The reason given is Washington. Xi lands Wednesday, there is a ceremony and a Rose Garden review, the bilateral is Thursday, and the state dinner that evening has a guest list that reads like the top of the index. Huang, Cook, Altman, Pichai, Bezos, Musk. Bessent and He Lifeng wrapped two days of talks in New York on Sunday, and the American proposal on the table is a notification mechanism for AI incidents serious enough to count as national security, which is an agreement to tell each other afterwards. Export controls on advanced chips and the equipment that makes them were not in those talks. The one lever Washington actually holds is off the agenda, and the chip complex is bid anyway.
Tomorrow is the forty-first anniversary of the Plaza Accord, the meeting people reach for when they want a meeting to matter. Five finance ministers, a Sunday announcement, the dollar down a fifth inside a year. It half fits. Plaza worked because the men in the room ran the balance sheets that had to move, and on Thursday the two men in the room run governments while the people whose order books are the actual subject will be eating dessert in the next one. I said this to a colleague on Friday and he reminded me Plaza took the better part of two years to look obviously correct. Nobody is positioned for two years.
Goolsbee spoke in London before most of New York was awake, at a conference called Monetary Policy in an Uncertain World, a title that has never once been wrong. After that, the Chicago Fed activity index and some bill auctions. Ten Fed appearances this week and no serious data until Michigan sentiment on Friday.
The desk closed Ford Motor (F) on the fifteenth, down about four and a half percent over twenty trading days against an S&P off a bit over two. Two and a bit points of relative, the wrong way. It did not hit the stop. Twenty sessions is the maximum hold here and the position reached it, so it closed on time. The warranty case was a cost story on a quarterly clock and I gave it a monthly one.
Gold near 4,353 an ounce, WTI at 94.00 with Brent around 102, Bitcoin in the low 81,000s, S&P futures up about six tenths, the 10-year at 4.97 percent. Bitcoin is four thousand dollars higher than Thursday and nobody has offered a reason, which is at least honest.
A rally with three sessions to run before the handshake. If the handshake goes well, we will have paid for it twice.
Salomon