The order the President signed on Friday night did more than pause a diesel arrangement with Moscow. It set aside, for sixty days, sanctions that Congress had passed and he had signed into law in September, and it did so two days before they were due to take effect. The measures suspended include tariffs of up to 100 percent on imports from the five largest purchasers of Russian oil and gas, most significantly China and India, along with sanctions on senior Russian figures including Vladimir Putin, on Russian financial institutions, and on the shadow fleet. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, described the suspension as a pause to analyse the effect on the American and global economies. The order drew objections from senators of the President’s own party: Ted Cruz called it a mistake, John Cornyn called it “reckless,” and Thom Tillis called it “beyond irresponsible.” In the same forty-eight hours, Ukrainian drones struck the St Petersburg oil terminal, killing at least one person, and Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian forces had attacked Ukraine’s energy sector 76 times since the “energy ceasefire” was announced a week ago. Equity markets had closed Friday with the Nasdaq down 2.15 percent and the volatility index up 21.45 percent.

The administration and the rule of law

The Federal Register published nothing in the window: zero presidential documents, zero rules, zero proposed rules, and zero notices across October 17 and 18. The Register does not print on weekends, so the emptiness is a fact about the calendar and not about the government. The week’s consequential executive action therefore appears in this record only as reporting.

The Friday-night order blocked numerous sanctions two days before they would have taken effect, and its stated ground was that suspending some served the national interest. Rubio put the suspension at sixty days, time to analyse what the sanctions and tariffs would do to the global economy and to the American one. The statute remains law. What the order suspends is its operation, and that distinction is the one to keep in view over the next sixty days, because the pause is an executive act and the statute it sets aside is still on the books.

The objections came from both parties, and the Republican ones are the ones to note. Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat, accused the President of capitulating to Moscow. Cruz, a Trump ally, told Fox News that waiving the sanctions was a mistake and that there were other ways to address fuel prices. Cornyn called the move “reckless,” Tillis called it “beyond irresponsible” and argued that the President could bring energy prices down by ending the Iran war instead, and Don Bacon of Nebraska indicated that lawmakers would now resist funding the President’s agenda. A party that supplies the votes for a sanctions statute and then watches it suspended has a choice between restoring it and accepting the precedent. Nothing in the weekend record says which it will choose.

The courts

The courts were silent. The Supreme Court filed no opinion in the window, the D.C. Circuit filed none, and the District Court for the District of Columbia recorded no new complaint. All three watched dockets were still: Beatty v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-04480, the Kennedy Center matter; Phang v. Blanche, No. 1:26-cv-01417, the Epstein files case; and the consolidated appeal at the D.C. Circuit, Nos. 26-5299 and 26-5334. The appeal’s feed had timed out in yesterday’s collection. It answered today and showed nothing filed, which closes a gap in the record rather than adding to it.

Markets

The board is Friday’s close, because the equity and Treasury markets were shut for the weekend. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 52,002.41, down 175.28 points or 0.34 percent. The S&P 500 closed at 7,659.44, down 84.62 or 1.09 percent, and the Nasdaq Composite at 26,140.034, down 572.992 or 2.15 percent. The CBOE volatility index closed at 19.99, up 3.53 or 21.45 percent, a rise from 16.46 in a single session. Gold was $4,186.70 an ounce and front-month crude $101.84 a barrel, up 3.95 percent; both prints carry an October 17 stamp, but neither price moved from Friday’s close, because there was no session in between. The dollar index was 101.779, down 0.276 or 0.27 percent, and the ten-year note yielded 5.081 percent.

The dispersion is the story in the equity board. The Nasdaq fell twice as far as the S&P 500 and more than six times as far as the Dow, which is a sale of the names whose value sits furthest in the future, and the ten-year note above five percent is the rate at which those names are discounted. Oil at $101.84 is a different market with a different cause, and it is the number the administration is trying to move.

The Treasury’s curve added its October 16 row: 4.74 percent at two years, 5.09 at ten, and 5.43 at thirty, against 4.77, 5.10, and 5.43 the day before. The two-year fell three basis points while the long end held, and the two-to-ten spread widened from 33 basis points to 35. The movement is small; the level is not.

The federal debt was $40,388,317,675,072 on October 15, the newest business day the Treasury reports, an increase of $59.09 billion from October 14. Debt held by the public was $32.54 trillion of the total, and $7.85 trillion was intragovernmental. The figure is unchanged from yesterday’s edition because the weekend produced no new borrowing report.

The economy

No new reading arrived in this window. The three September series are the same ones the pack has carried since they were published: the consumer price index for all urban consumers at 336.940, against 334.980 in August and 333.918 in July, a rise of 0.6 percent in a month; unemployment at 4.2 percent, a tenth of a point above August and July; and total nonfarm payrolls at 159,044 thousand, against 159,015 thousand in August, an increase of 29,000. Prices firmed while hiring slowed in the same month, and the administration’s stated aim in the sanctions pause is to bring down fuel costs ahead of the midterm elections. The labor reading is a month old and the fuel price is the one moving.

Elections and the midterms

On Polymarket, the House market puts the Democratic Party at 90.5 percent on $104,763 of twenty-four-hour volume, against the Republican Party at 9.5 percent on $49,473. The Senate market puts the Democratic Party at 64.5 percent on $30,527 and the Republican Party at 37.5 percent on $108,925; the larger volume sits on the Republican side even though the price does not, which says more about where traders are active than about where the race stands. The balance-of-power market prices a Democratic sweep at 62.5 percent on $118,745 and a Republican sweep at 8.5 percent on $62,361.

The Iran war is written into the book. A conditional market, who wins the Senate pending a Hormuz agreement before the midterms, puts no agreement at 91.1 percent on $56,588, and crude closed Friday above one hundred dollars. In the individual races, Texas prices James Talarico at 62.5 percent on $30,978 and Ken Paxton at 37.5 percent on $45,341, Michigan prices Mike Rogers at 31.0 percent on $61,044, and Nevada prices Aaron Ford at 57.5 percent on $31,601 for governor. A pair of House districts are near settled by the venues’ prices: California’s fourth at 96.6 percent Democratic on $28,809, and Texas’s sixth at 98.8 percent on $27,228 for Jake Ellzey. These are the venues’ prices, not this site’s view.

The world

Ukraine’s drones reached St Petersburg before dawn on Sunday. Alexandre Beglov, the city’s governor, called it a “massive” attack: at least one person was killed and five injured, and firefighters worked blazes at the St Petersburg oil terminal, the Ruchi oil depot, and industrial warehouses in the Kolpino district south of the city. Several residential buildings and two houses were hit, and flights at the city’s main airport were restricted “for safety reasons.” Alexander Drozdenko, governor of the surrounding Leningrad region, said 145 drones were shot down and about 20,000 people lost electricity. The defence ministry put the overnight total at 1,015 Ukrainian drones “neutralised overnight,” and the state news agency TASS called the attack the largest on the region in four years.

The Russian side of the exchange was heavier in civilian terms. Zelensky said in a post on X that overnight strikes on residential buildings killed two people and injured twelve, including two children, and that a morning strike hit an agricultural enterprise in Volyn. He put the week’s totals at almost 2,700 attack drones, 1,700 aerial bombs, and 66 missiles, most of them ballistic, and said Russia had struck Ukraine’s energy and oil and gas sectors 76 times since the President announced the “energy ceasefire” a week ago. “America should see that Russia is not taking any reciprocal steps in response to sanctions relief or agreements,” he wrote.

That sentence is the connection between this section and the last. The energy ceasefire was announced as a way to let Russian diesel move. Kyiv resumed strikes on Russian refineries after three days of fresh Russian attacks, and the strikes now reach the oil infrastructure the ceasefire was meant to leave alone. The sanctions pause runs sixty days, and the war it is meant to calm produced, in the same weekend, the largest attack on the Leningrad region in four years and a Ukrainian answer on the same infrastructure. Neither side has given the other a reason to stop.

Sources

Fetched for this edition

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 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