Low Tech.

So Wednesday was all about Tesla and Amazon, with the former plunging on concerns about fatal accidents that are maybe/maybe not related to Elon Musk’s Autopilot/auto lawsuit feature and the latter falling on jitters about whether Donald Trump is going to get sick enough of the Washington Post to take it out on Jeff Bezos.

We wrote extensively about all of those issues here, but suffice to say this is the situation for Tesla shares:

This is the situation for Tesla bonds:

As Bloomberg notes, yields there are still below “the average 9.21% yield on junk bonds with ratings in the CCC tier.”

And this is how things are shaping up for Amazon on the week:

Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried to reassure everyone that the President of the United States isn’t about to try and fuck over Bezos due to the editorial line at WaPo. “We have no announcements or specific policies that we’re pushing forward or considering taking” she said in her daily propaganda briefing.

Responding to Axios report this morning, Sarah Sanders says there are no specific policies that the White House is considering on Amazon pic.twitter.com/k5yhlVXNKD

— Axios (@axios) March 28, 2018

But while short on specifics, Trump isn’t short on agitation. Here’s are a fun couple of quotables from Charlie:

a person close to @POTUS tells @FoxBusiness: "Bezos is poking the pit bull with his coverage of Trump in @washingtonpost and based on what I know there's only so much more Trump will take before he takes it out on @amazon" $amzn

— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) March 28, 2018

as in all things @realDonaldTrump his concern about @amazon isnt its business practices but its what he believes is the personal animus of its ceo @JeffBezos and the @washingtonpost to him and one person close to trump told me he's preparing to lash out $amzn

— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) March 28, 2018

Long story short:

The Nasdaq was of course the laggard again, falling another 0.9% on top of Tuesday’s outsized loses. This is five out of the last six sessions:

The Nasdaq ‘VIX’ was up again on Wednesday, hitting a 30 handle:

Don’t look now, but the BMO REX MicroSectors FANG+ Index -3X Inverse Leveraged ETN (and yes, that is just as absurd as it sounds), is on a damn tear, up a smooth 49% over the past 10 days as FANG plunges. Volume has tripled.

The dollar surged, with USDJPY rising to a two-week high and USDSEK hitting a 2018 peak.

Some of the move in the yen is being attributed to month-end flows, there’s probably some geopolitical relief baked in there as well as the news surrounding Kim’s openness to denuclearization continues to sound positive following the boy King’s meeting with Xi. According to Asahi, Kim is open to holding a North Korea-Japan summit as soon as June.

Gold dove as the dollar rose, adding to Tuesday’s losses as shiny doorstops move sharply off 6-week highs:

More flattening – 2s10s now inside 49bps.

Bitcoin and stocks – both supported by the 200-DMA (people hate this shit):

European shares managed to limp higher by the close, but it was ugly for tech across the pond as well, as European tech shares fell 2%:

As noted first thing this morning, it was a bloodbath in Hong Kong on Wednesday as the tech rout on Wall Street spread. The Hang Seng and H-shares were both off by ~2.5%:

Finally, for your moment of zen, here is Hucka-San talking about pardoning Paul Manafort:

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders deflects a question about a New York Times report that Trump’s lawyer John Dowd floated the idea of presidential pardons for Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn https://t.co/3qTne5xFpZ https://t.co/ucqcMNiUbJ

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) March 28, 2018