On Saturday an American fighter struck the stern of a Panama-flagged cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman with a precision munition, disabling its propulsion after, by Central Command’s account, the crew ignored repeated warnings and tried to run the blockade of Iran’s ports. The command’s statement on Sunday also totaled the campaign: since the blockade resumed on July 14, four commercial vessels have been put out of action, 135 ships have been turned back, and ten tankers tied to the Revolutionary Guard’s shadow oil network have been destroyed. The ship, the Ocean Molica, also sails as the Arika Sun, and nobody aboard was hurt. The operation drew criticism from at least one senator, Chris Murphy, a Democrat, who questioned what purpose the campaign serves. Everything else in the American government was quiet. The Federal Register published nothing across the two days, the courts filed nothing, and a five-day deadline the President set on October 5 for relief from the diesel excise tax passed on Saturday with no determination that this report can find.

The administration and the rule of law

The Register’s window, October 10 through October 11, holds nothing at all: no presidential document, no rule, no proposed rule, no notice. The two days are a weekend, so the emptiness is the calendar rather than the news, and the newest material on this beat remains Friday’s issue, which carried 89 documents and which this report read yesterday morning.

One item from that issue is now past its deadline. Executive Order 14435, signed October 5 and published Friday, gave the Secretary of the Treasury five days to determine whether relief is authorized under 26 U.S.C. 7508A and, if it is, to defer the diesel taxes incurred between October 5 and December 31 without penalty, interest, or addition to the tax. A second clock on the same five days required a directive to the Internal Revenue Service to announce that it would not penalize the highway use of dyed diesel over the same period. The fifth day was Saturday. No determination appears anywhere in the Register’s window, and the Service’s own newsroom still lists IR-2026-120, dated October 7, as its newest release. Section 4 of the order asks the Secretary to explore avenues, legislation among them, to eliminate the deferred liability outright, which is the distance between a delay and a forgiveness; as of this morning not even the delay has been announced.

The rest of Friday’s issue carries no live thread. Commerce published the results of administrative reviews of duties on tires from Thailand, hot-rolled steel from Korea, and paper shopping bags from Cambodia; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation proposed a rule on extensions of credit to insiders; Health and Human Services classified three medical devices; and a Treasury proposed rule on refundable tax credits drew a notice cancelling its hearing.

The courts

Quiet, and quiet in every part. The Supreme Court filed no opinion in the window, the D.C. Circuit filed none, and the District Court for the District of Columbia took no new complaint. None of the three dockets this report watches recorded a filing either, so Beatty v. Trump, the Kennedy Center case, and both captions in Phang v. Blanche stand where Friday left them.

Markets

The cash market is shut for the weekend and the board carries no new print. Every figure below is the one this report carried yesterday, and each keeps its own stamp.

Friday’s close was higher across the board. The S&P 500 finished at 7,811.54, up 46.18 points or 0.59 percent; the Nasdaq Composite at 27,366.17, up 172.83 points or 0.64 percent; and the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 51,654.95, up 423.31 points or 0.83 percent. The VIX closed at 14.84, down 0.57 or 3.70 percent, and the dollar index at 102.231, up 0.093.

The futures quotes carry later stamps, both dated October 10. Gold’s front month stood at $4,220.30, up $63.30 or 1.52 percent, and West Texas Intermediate at $91.66, up $0.17 or 0.19 percent. Gold above $4,200 while the VIX sits under 15 is a hedge bought against a stock market that is not pricing trouble. This report flagged the same pair yesterday, and a weekend does not settle which of the two is right.

The 10-year Treasury note yielded 5.242 percent on its own October 9 stamp, up nine-tenths of a basis point. The Treasury’s daily curve for October 9 put the 2-year at 4.80 percent, the 10-year at 5.24 percent, and the 30-year at 5.60 percent, leaving a 2s10s spread of positive 44 basis points against 47 for October 8. The curve flattened by three across the two days, and the front end did the work.

Total public debt outstanding stood at $40,305,316,210,830 as of October 8, up $21,280,063,463 on the prior business day. Debt held by the public was $32,454,086,117,711, and $7,851,230,093,118 of the total sat in government accounts.

The economy

No series in the pack posted a new observation in this window, so the newest readings stand as they were. The consumer price index for all urban consumers was 334.980 in August, against 333.918 in July, a rise of about a third of a percent. The unemployment rate was 4.2 percent in September, a tenth of a point above the 4.1 percent readings of July and August. Total nonfarm payrolls were 159,044 thousand in September against 159,015 thousand in August, which cuts the monthly gain from about 133,000 to about 29,000. Read together the three say the labor market is cooling rather than breaking, and that one month is not a trend.

Elections and the midterms

Prediction markets trade through the weekend, so this beat moved while the cash market did not. On Polymarket, the House market gave the Democratic Party 90.5 percent on $318,503 of 24-hour volume and the Republican Party 9.5 percent on $199,513, the same prices as yesterday. The Senate market put the Republican Party at 36.5 percent on $32,426, a point below this report’s reading yesterday. The balance-of-power market gave a Republican sweep 8.5 percent on $97,117 and a Democratic Senate with a Republican House 0.9 percent on $30,314.

State books with volume behind them told a mixed story. In the Texas Senate race, James Talarico stood at 63.5 percent on $23,906 and Ken Paxton at 36.5 percent on $85,399. Alaska had Mary Peltola at 72.5 percent on $37,906. Michigan had Abdul El-Sayed at 68.5 percent on $20,847, three points below yesterday. Iowa had Ashley Hinson at 58.5 percent on $24,756. Tennessee had Bill Hagerty at 93.4 percent on $20,566 against Marquita Bradshaw at 6.8 percent on $27,285. Two thinner books rounded out the board: CA-23 had Tessa Lynn Hodge at 2.8 percent on $22,238, and a market putting the Republican caucus at 53 Senate seats stood at 5.1 percent on $51,644.

These are the venues’ prices and not this site’s view. The weekend’s movement was small, mixed, and in both directions, and the widest disagreement on the board is still the gap between the House market’s 90.5 percent and the balance-of-power market’s 8.5 percent for a Republican sweep, which is the Senate, priced as the closer question.

The world

American forces fired on a ship running the blockade on Saturday, and Central Command’s account came on Sunday with three months of enforcement numbered. A fighter struck the stern of the Ocean Molica, the Panama-flagged cargo vessel that also sails as the Arika Sun, after the crew ignored repeated warnings and tried to run the blockade of Iranian ports; the munition disabled the ship’s propulsion and nobody aboard was hurt. Since the blockade resumed on July 14, the command said, four commercial vessels have been put out of action, 135 ships have been turned back, and ten tankers tied to the Guard’s shadow oil network have been destroyed. In Washington the operation drew a public objection from Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, who asked in a post on X what purpose the campaign serves and called it a disaster.

Iran answered in the register it has used all month. The Revolutionary Guard said its forces had struck an LPG carrier it accused of transiting by an illegal route, and claimed that a supertanker struck a mine while leaving the strait, an account the reporting could not verify. UKMTO recorded a tanker struck on its port side by an unknown projectile, with a fire aboard and all crew safe, and a separate incident in the Gulf of Oman involving a tanker and military forces; the United Arab Emirates rescued 22 crew members from a burning tanker in the Arabian Gulf.

Neither side’s account governs the traffic, which is what matters to everyone outside the war. About a fifth of the world’s oil and gas shipments normally transit Hormuz, and the venues expect no quick return to that. The market asking whether traffic through the strait returns to normal by October 31 was priced at 0.9 percent on $214,908, and the one asking whether the United States announces an end to the blockade by October 31 at 12.5 percent on $115,207. A ceasefire continuing through October 31 was priced at 78.5 percent on $299,780 against 96.5 percent for the same question through October 12, and a United States invasion of Iran before 2027 at 16.5 percent on $176,196. The near term, the venue says, holds; the month does not.

Sources

Fetched for this edition

Federal Register documents

Court dockets

Market and election prices

Data

  • Bureau of Labor Statistics, public data API, series CUUR0000SA0, LNS14000000, and CES0000000001.
  • The U.S. Treasury daily yield curve, the Treasury’s debt-to-the-penny figures, and the CNBC quote service. These three carry no link in this edition: their endpoints were read by the collector, which did not record a URL for them, and this report does not construct one.

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman