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The old pattern was simple. Oil goes up. Growth and inflation expectations go up. Treasury yields go up. Stocks and everything else go down. Rinse and repeat.
That pattern held every single time at the start of this Middle East conflict. Every time crude spiked, the bond market flinched, rates climbed, and the macro story wrote itself: energy prices up means input costs up means the Fed stays higher for longer. Straightforward. Mechanical. Predictable.
Except that pattern just broke.
Last week, WTI crude surged from roughly $100 a barrel to north of $110... a move of more than 10% in a single week... and during that exact same stretch, the 2-year Treasury yield moved lower. Oil surging. Rates declining. At the same time.
That’s not noise. That’s not an algorithm misfiring. That’s the market quietly repricing something enormous... and most of the financial press hasn’t noticed yet.
So what’s the market actually saying... and why does that shift have everything to do with the private credit crisis that’s accelerating right now?
The Labor Data Nobody’s Reading Correctly
Before connecting those dots, let’s walk through the week’s economic data, because context matters more than the headline number... and the headlines were, predictably, misleading.
