Monday is Columbus Day, a federal holiday, and the American government has gone quiet for it: the Federal Register published nothing across the window this report reads, Sunday and Monday together, and the federal courts filed nothing either. The movement was abroad. The Houthi campaign against Saudi Arabia reached a pitch the war has not shown before. By Anadolu’s tally of official statements, ten strikes hit five Saudi airports between October 5 and October 11, killing 20 people and wounding hundreds. Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport took the worst of it. A missile strike there on Saturday killed 13 and wounded 309, which the Associated Press called the deadliest attack in a Gulf Arab nation since the war began; the civil aviation authority first counted 12 dead, and the toll rose when an injured Indian national died of his wounds on Sunday. The same field was struck again, and the Saudi-led coalition said air defenses intercepted a cruise missile near the airport, a ballistic missile aimed at Khamis Mushait, and a drone in the Eastern Province. Riyadh’s schools moved to distance learning for the week, and the oil market noticed: West Texas Intermediate traded at $92.76 a barrel, up about a percent, before the American cash session opened.

The administration and the rule of law

The window holds nothing at all: no presidential document, no rule, no proposed rule, no notice. Sunday is Sunday, and Monday is Columbus Day, which the Office of Personnel Management lists among the federal holidays, so the emptiness is the calendar rather than the news. The newest material on this beat remains Friday’s issue; the collector’s two-day window ending that day carried 222 documents, one of them a presidential order.

That order is now past its clock. Executive Order 14435, Emergency Tax Relief on Diesel Fuel, signed October 5 and published Friday at 91 FR 64747, requires the Secretary of the Treasury to determine within five days whether relief is authorized under 26 U.S.C. 7508A, and to direct the Internal Revenue Service to announce that it will not impose the penalty at 26 U.S.C. 6715 when dyed diesel fuel is used on the highway. The order defers the diesel taxes incurred between October 5 and December 31. The fifth day was Saturday. No determination appears 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 obligation outright, which is the distance between a delay and a forgiveness; as of this morning not even the delay has been announced.

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. A federal holiday is a large part of the explanation, and the absence of news is still the finding.

Markets

The cash market has not opened on Monday morning, so the index prints are Friday’s and each figure keeps its own stamp. Friday finished higher across the board. The S&P 500 closed 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 volatility index and the futures carry Monday stamps, and they moved overnight. The VIX stood at 15.47, up 0.63 or 4.25 percent, as of 6:59 a.m. Eastern. West Texas Intermediate was $92.76, up $0.91 or 0.99 percent, and gold’s front month $4,201.10, down $15.20 or 0.36 percent, both as of 6:50 a.m. Eastern. The dollar index was 102.40, up 0.187 or 0.18 percent, as of 7:00 a.m. Eastern. Oil up a percent while gold slips and the VIX rises four percent is a board pricing a supply risk, and at 15.47 the volatility index is still low enough to say that nothing here reads as alarm.

The Treasury’s daily curve has no Monday row; its newest is October 9, which put the 2-year at 4.80 percent, the 10-year at 5.24 percent, and the 30-year at 5.60 percent, a 2s10s spread of positive 44 basis points against 47 for October 8. The 10-year note itself yielded 5.242 percent on its own October 9 stamp, up nine-tenths of a basis point.

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

The pack’s three series carry the same reference months as yesterday’s edition, so this window produced no new reading. 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 still 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 holiday, so this beat moved while the cash market slept. On Polymarket the House market gave the Republican Party 9.5 percent on $97,451 of 24-hour volume, the same price as yesterday’s report carried. The Senate market put the Democratic Party at 63.5 percent on $38,094. The balance-of-power market gave a Republican sweep 8.5 percent on $147,334, a Republican Senate with a Democratic House 28.5 percent on $116,763, and a Democratic Senate with a Republican House 0.9 percent on $500,015.

In Texas, James Talarico stood at 62.5 percent on $84,166 and Ken Paxton at 37.5 percent on $58,106, a point of movement toward Paxton since yesterday’s reading. Alaska had Senator Dan Sullivan at 28.5 percent on $21,592.

One oddity is worth naming. The midterm board has grown a conditional: a market asking who wins the Senate pending a Hormuz agreement by October 23 put 88.8 percent on no agreement at all, $274,496 of volume behind the Republican side at 4.0 percent and $148,995 behind the Democratic side at 6.7 percent. A foreign war now sits inside the pricing of an American midterm, and the venue expects the war to outlast the question.

The world

The war’s newest front is Saudi Arabia’s airports, and the week’s arithmetic is stark. Anadolu, counting official statements, put the total at ten strikes on five airports between October 5 and October 11, with 20 people killed and hundreds wounded over that stretch. King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh absorbed five of the ten, King Fahd International Airport in Dammam two, and the rest fell on airports at Abha, Jazan and Najran. The deadliest came on Saturday at Riyadh, where 13 people were killed and 309 wounded; the General Authority of Civil Aviation first reported 12 dead, and the toll rose when India’s embassy said one of its citizens had died of injuries sustained in the strike. Among the dead the Saudi authorities counted four Saudis, two Bangladeshis, and one national each of the United States, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Palestine and Sudan.

The campaign did not pause at the weekend. Riyadh’s airport was struck again on Sunday: a projectile hit Terminal 4 and started a fire, and the General Authority of Civil Aviation counted one Pakistani resident killed and 11 others injured, Gulf News reported. The coalition’s spokesman, Major General Turki al-Malki, said air defenses had intercepted and destroyed a ballistic missile aimed at Khamis Mushait, a cruise missile near the airport, and a drone in the Eastern Province, Asharq Al-Awsat reported. The aviation authority extended the suspension of operations at King Khalid while it checked the field. Etihad cancelled services linking Abu Dhabi with Riyadh, Dammam and Jeddah through Tuesday, and SriLankan suspended its Riyadh flights through October 18. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency told carriers to avoid portions of Saudi airspace and to exercise caution elsewhere in the Jeddah flight information region, citing attacks, interceptions, misidentification and falling debris. Riyadh’s schools moved to distance learning for the week starting Sunday. A strike on Dammam’s King Fahd International Airport drew no casualty figure from the aviation authority, which said damage and safety checks were still underway.

Iran, which arms and backs the Houthis, spent the weekend at a distance from this campaign and inside the Hormuz standoff instead. Its foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baqaei, said Tehran was deeply concerned about events in the Arabian Peninsula and offered to use its good offices to facilitate dialogue, and the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, took a call from his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi. The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Mohsen Rezaei, called the American reply to Iran’s seven conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz inadequate and ruled out a return to the previous arrangement. Those conditions were offered in exchange for restoring normal shipping within seven days, and the answer came back through Qatari intermediaries.

The venues read the war as a stalemate with a long tail. The market on traffic through the strait returning to normal by December 31 stood at 14.5 percent on $109,778, and the one on the United States announcing an end to the blockade by October 31 at 14.5 percent on $102,999. A ceasefire between the United States and Iran continuing through October 12 was priced at 98.0 percent on $372,410, and through October 15 at 94.5 percent on $142,522. The near term is expected to hold. The quarter is 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