Journey.

It’s a good think it’s Friday, because things are getting terribly tedious out there.

Markets are torn between Journey (“don’t stop believin'”) and the reality of mounting infection totals in the US, where new cases hit a record above 37,000 on Thursday.

Florida joined Texas in freezing the reopening process, and Nevada is mandating masks in public. Donald Trump hasn’t said much, but the forgotten coronavirus “task force” will apparently hold a press briefing before the weekend.

It would be a stretch to use a single data point to draw any conclusions, but the figure (above) shows a reversal in the trend for the restaurant recovery in Houston, where Texas’s outbreak is particularly acute.

State-level data isn’t as dramatic (yet), but analysts are starting to notice. BofA flagged the first signs of a tentative reversal in restaurant bookings in states with a sharp rise in virus cases, in the course of warning that if infection counts keeping rising, the market will doubt the viability of the recovery.

“With several US states seeing sharp increases in hospitalizations, timely data (like restaurant bookings) show the US ‘V’ in reverse”, SocGen’s Kit Juckes said. “Whether this leads to local lockdowns depends on the politicians, but it is already affecting activity”.

Christine Lagarde delivered something of a reality check during a webinar. “We’re not going to return to ex ante status quo, it is going to be different”, she said. “The airline industries, the hospitality industries, the entertainment industries are going to come out of [the] recovery process in a different shape, and some of them will probably be hurt irremediably”. (“Irremediably” is such a Lagarde term by the way.)

Markets are weary. “Volumes have been utterly abysmal. The answer to the question of ‘why thus-and-so has done what it has, such as it has’, is simply, ‘because'”, former trader Richard Breslow said. “Ask for more color than that and you get a blank stare. Or, that the S&P 500 was up yesterday, so it’s sagging this morning”.

We’re back to watching lines. And we’re losing momentum. Or breadth. Or both.

The market was overbought as late as June 8. Now it’s dead center between overbought and oversold on the 14-day RSI, if that’s your thing. It’s not mine.

The “Fed takes action to cap bank dividends, ban buybacks through September” headline has been playing on a loop for about 14 straight hours. It’s not that it isn’t notable but let’s face it: If there were anything else going on, that story would have come and gone within two hours of Thursday afternoon’s Fed statement.

“I think there are going to be a few more dips to come”, one PM told Bloomberg TV. Because you’ve gotta say something when asked.

“It’s amazing, the market doesn’t care about fundamentals or earnings at this point, they care about the pandemic and the pandemic only”, that person added. With due respect, the market hasn’t really cared about “fundamentals” for years.

It’s oh so easy to close any deadpan post with a Richard Breslow quote, but for lack of preferable alternatives, I’m going to avail myself here. To wit:

In any case, it is Friday. They are stretching out the economic numbers until 10 Eastern Time. So we’ll see what happens. I guarantee it will all have seemed terribly predictable after the fact