Summer, and the lackadaisical torpidity that often accompanies it, are right around the corner.

In fact, this coming weekend marks the unofficial beginning of my least favorite season. I’m less than enthused.

There are no top-tier US macro releases on the docket this week, nor any second-tier updates for that matter. That’s probably for the best given that anyone unlucky (or junior) enough to be shackled to a terminal ahead of Memorial Day weekend will be mentally checked out anyway.

Housing market aficionados will get builder sentiment (seen at a hopeless 34 on Monday), pending home sales (seen posting a small advance on Tuesday) and new construction figures (starts seen falling 5% in government data due Thursday).

Other than that, the April FOMC minutes are the only thing on the calendar. That, and preliminary PMIs from S&P Global (I’ve stopped covering those because nobody trades them) and the final read on University of Michigan sentiment which, hitting as it will on the Friday before Memorial Day, will be a “If a tree falls in the forest but no one’s around to hear, does it make a sound?”-type of deal.

That’s not to say the new week doesn’t have the potential for fireworks. There’s a war goin’ outside, no man is safe from (to quote the late, great Prodigy). Well, I guess you’re safe from it if you’re in the upper-half of the “K,” but by now, I imagine even the well-off are losing their sense of humor about pump prices. I know I am.

My CLE 53 has a sibling: A GLC 43, which is more practical for trips, and filling it up yesterday left me almost as aggravated at Pete Hegseth as the father of a first-grader in Minab. (Too soon?)

“That it?” asked the gas station clerk, scanning the bar code on a blueberry RXBAR. “I also need three thousand on pump four,” I quipped. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a Trump voter by her half-empty Mountain Dew 20 oz and a name tag that says “Maisie.” Even she was sympathetic: “You’re tellin’ me, hun.”

Rates remain beholden to crude prices, which are in turn a function of war developments.

Note that the long-end ETF’s now back to the lows seen in October of 2023, when oversupply / sponsorship concerns forced Janet Yellen to incorporate placative language into successive QRAs.

In their latest weekly, BMO’s US rates team lamented “the realities of geopolitical negotiations conducted on social media.”

“It is less about marginal credibility, per se, and more a function of the outright contrasting headlines, with the administration asserting a fact only to have it contested shortly thereafter,” Ian Lyngen remarked. “The resulting environment has lowered conviction and created a collective reluctance to establish positions based on the fundamentals when any such effort could immediately prove folly via Trump’s next [TruthSocial] post.”

Although US equities were able to ignore the melee on their way to more than a dozen new record highs since the Iran war lows, the back up in Treasury yields and accompanying hawkish repricing in STIRs finally caught up to Wall Street late last week. Any additional upside for yields is going to be a problem.

The good news is, the last two times the long bond sported a five-handle (i.e., in May and July of last year), 30-year yields only lingered north of the Maginot Line for three sessions. And as Lyngen noted, the October 2023 episode mentioned above lasted less than two weeks.

Oh, and it’s worth noting that WHO over the weekend declared a global health emergency in connection with an Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. The advisory implored the international community to coordinate, cooperate and step up “surveillance, prevention and response efforts.”

“There are significant uncertainties as to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread associated with this event at the present time,” the WHO notice warned. “In addition, there is limited understanding of the epidemiological links with known or suspected cases.”

Asked on Saturday about the situation, and whether America’s prepared for another public health crisis, the nation’s foremost authority on infectious diseases said that although none of the available Ebola vaccines and antibody treatments are approved specifically for the Bundibugyo strain, the CDC’s exploring all options.

“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” he told reporters. “Supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way.”