SoFi stock falls after announcing $1.5B public offering of common stock
There are weeks when markets simply misbehave, and then there are weeks like this — where every asset class feels slightly off-kilter, as if someone nudged the global macro machine a few degrees off true north and the bearings haven’t stopped grinding since.
What began as a routine post-shutdown recalibration has morphed into a late-week doom loop, the sort of ambient tension traders can feel in their molars before they see it on the screens. And the question cropping up on every desk — from London to Singapore — isn’t philosophical: can equities spill another two or three percent from here? The answer is uncomfortably simple. Yes. Easily.
Momentum didn’t just melt this week; it bled out on the pavement. These long-leg unwind phases have a rhythm—historically around 25 sessions—and we’re sitting at day 21 of this one. Retail remains grotesquely over their skis, emboldened by months of one-way AI euphoria, and dealers are swimming in negative gamma.
When vol spikes, the machines sell. When they sell, vol spikes. And so the carousel spins until positioning itself burns out or someone turns the lights back on in the rates complex.
But the thing that has every veteran trader rubbing their temples is far simpler: the SPX–MOVE gap has blown wide open, and SPX despises surging bond volatility.
Chart Via Market Ear
Rates vol is the market’s bad-tempered houseguest — slamming cabinet doors, waking the neighbours, complaining about the plumbing — and equities have been forced into perpetual flinch mode. Until that volatility storm settles, the tape will continue to twitch like an overloaded circuit board.
And don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Rate markets are where the next real move comes from. Implied volatility in swaptions, which has been crushed for weeks, is finally curling up as traders brace for the data to return. FX ALERT: The Market’s Quiet Hum Before the Next Gear Slips. ( yesterday’s FX Alert)
And then comes the FX plot twist: a hawkish Fed, a stickier inflation narrative, a chorus of Fed officials warning that cuts are not imminent — and yet the dollar weakens. If you wanted proof this market is thinking beyond the Fed’s tone, this is it. The USD drifted toward a weekly loss as Singapore’s eFX pipes pulsed with outsized flows in GBP, KRW, and even CNY, where the onshore yuan punched to its strongest level in over a year. A curious reaction for a supposedly hawkish Fed week.
What the market is signalling is not subtle: traders are bracing for an avalanche of delayed U.S. data now that Washington is back online — and the street suspects it won’t smell like resilience, possibly stagflation. The October jobs print arrives without an unemployment rate; the much-delayed September payrolls hit next week. Beneath the surface, private jobs indicators are showing fractures. CPI internals reveal that 55% of the basket is running above 3%on an annualized month-on-month basis — a statistic that typically kills any dream of a clean December cut. And yet, even with all that, the dollar didn’t rally. That tells you all you need to know. Markets fear what the upcoming data fog may reveal. Growth concerns are beginning to whisper louder than the hawks, echoing a stagflation warning in the room.
Layer on China’s deepening credit malaise — aggregate financing crawling to just 815bn yuan, the weakest in over a year — and you get a global macro backdrop that feels tired, foggy, and brittle. The PBoC isn’t reaching for the bazooka. Not in Q4. Not even as the economy coughs. It looks like 2026 is when Beijing plans to reload the fiscal cannons, not now.
And into this already jittery global setting comes Germany — finally waking up to the fact that the problem isn’t a cyclical downswing, but a structural one. Earlier this summer, Chancellor Friedrich Merz promised a “Fall of Reforms,” and this week, Berlin delivered the first meaningful tremor (mildly Euro bullish). After fifteen years of underinvestment, delayed modernization, and China out-competing them in their own industrial backyard, Germany’s Council of Economic Advisors now warns that Europe’s economic anchor is staring at its biggest challenge in 80 years. That’s not hyperbole — that’s a funeral bell for an old model.
What’s unnerving markets isn’t simply that Germany is weak; it’s that Berlin now accepts the weakness is structural. Reforms were supposed to start with the fiscal U-turn earlier this year, but policymakers acted as if one pivot could magically fix a decade-plus neglect. Now they’ve been forced back to the table with a flurry of measures in the past 24 hours that read like a government suddenly realizing 2026 growth might only “recover” because of three extra working days on the calendar. Not because of an actual economic rebound.
So Berlin is moving — but without a masterplan. A fixed 5-cent energy price for heavy industry until 2028. Eight gigawatts of new gas power plants. Reduced air-traffic control fees to save the aviation sector. A resurrected “Germany Fund” meant to funnel private capital into SMEs and scale-ups. And even the return of semi-compulsory military service for 18-year-olds. It’s reform by adrenaline, not strategy — and every announcement still needs to survive the gauntlet of parliament, coalition politics, and the European Commission.
But markets don’t trade the legislative process; they trade the signal. And the signal is clear: another major economy is shifting from cyclical patience to structural panic. Germany’s scramble adds a fresh pressure ridge into the global macro atmosphere — one more reason why traders aren’t willing to plant a bullish flag and why equities feel increasingly allergic to every uptick in vol.
So here we are: a hawkish Fed whose currency won’t rally, a China credit engine coughing on the incline, a Europe waking up late to decades of structural rot, and an S&P 500 that quietly erased its entire November gain. This is not a clean macro map. It’s a fogged-up cockpit at dusk, with warning lights pinging in several languages at once.
The direction of travel remains lower USD in the medium term — but for reasons that defy the old rules. And until rates volatility calms, until the U.S. data dam bursts, until China stirs, and until Germany finds something resembling a coherent strategy, this end-of-week doom loop can indeed persist.