Asked again

The deeper account

Friday began quietly and a little higher. The S&P 500 opened at 7,709.86, 5.73 above Thursday's close, and by 9:56 it was up 29.45 at 7,733.58, with oil falling as the talk of a deal in stages to reopen the Strait of Hormuz carried into a second day. At ten o'clock the University of Michigan published the final reading of its September survey of consumers. It was low, and it was better than expected: sentiment 48.1, against 47.5 forecast and 47.8 in the preliminary, the lowest in four months, with the index of expectations at 46.3. People said they expected prices to rise 4.6 percent over the next year, up from 4.0 in August, and 3.4 percent a year over the next five, up from 3.3. The survey's director said views of personal finances had weakened about 10 percent and that worries about high prices were still climbing.

The one-year figure was not new. The preliminary reading, published on 11 September and printed on this book's page for that day, had already said 4.6. The final reading adds the rest of the month's interviews to the first ones; this time the rest of the month said the same thing. Whatever the market heard at ten o'clock, it had been told before. It moved anyway. The long-bond fund was already slipping and it fell faster; the ten-year Treasury yield touched about 5.22 percent, its highest since 2007, and the thirty-year about 5.50 percent, its highest since 2004. The index fell 4.28 points in the 10:00 minute, 5.15 in the next, and 9.97 in the 10:05 minute alone, which took it through Thursday's close of 7,704.13. From 10:00 to the end of the 10:05 minute it lost 31.63 points, the sharpest fall of the day.

Then it spent twenty-six minutes on the line. Three minutes below, five above, nine below — the low, 7,693.08, came at 10:15, 11.05 under Thursday's close — then eight above, the last of them at 10:29 by two hundredths of a point, then one more below at 10:30. At 10:31 it crossed back above, for the sixth and last time. For the rest of the session the index never traded below Thursday's close again. At 11:46 it came back to 7,705.38, 1.25 points above it, and turned. By 12:05 it was above where it would finish, the high came at 15:51 at 7,752.07, and it closed at 7,743.41, up 39.28, 85.3 percent of the way up its range. Of the 390 minutes in the session, 377 closed above Thursday's close and thirteen below, every one of the thirteen before half past ten.

What lifted it was mostly one company. Microsoft rebuilt its Copilot assistant around three new pieces — Home, which folds its chat and office programs into one place, Code, which builds small applications from a description, and Autopilot, an agent that keeps working on a task — and the shares rose 3.65 percent, $134.92 billion of market value, about 120 points of the Dow's 478.64 by the press's count. The Dow rose 0.93 percent to 51,828.62, the S&P 500 0.51 and the equal-weight fund 0.40. Industrials were the best sector and eight of the eleven rose; the three that fell were real estate, energy, with oil down, and communication services, because Meta gave back three quarters of what it had made on Thursday. Software as a group fell 1.09 percent on the day its largest member rose 3.65, with Zscaler down 10.07 after its sales chief left. Costco rose 2.95 after results that beat.

In Washington, Xi Jinping's state visit ended on Friday with tea at the White House, a visit to the National Archives and, in The Washington Post's summary, warm words and no clear breakthroughs; the trade truce had been extended on Thursday to 10 January. The index finished the week at 7,743.41, up 92.91 from the 7,650.50 it started at, its first weekly gain in three weeks, and 0.71 percent below the record close of 13 August. Monday's 114.20 was more than the whole of it: the four sessions since, added together, gave back 21.29.

Two honest notes. The first is about cause. This page does not say the survey moved the market; it says what the market did in the minutes after the survey was published, and that the headline figure in it was a figure the market already had. The wires linked the bond market's move to the report and did not agree on where the ten-year closed — 5.15 in one account, 5.18 in another. The second is about prices: the feed's official closing prints for Friday had not been published when this page was built, and the closes shown for individual companies and funds are their last regular-session trades; the press printed Microsoft's official close at 516.17, seven cents above the figure here. The index close is the settled 7,743.41.

In the photograph it is ten o'clock in the concourse of a big old railway station, and the morning sun is coming down through the high windows in long dusty shafts. Against one wall stands a coin photo booth with its curtain half drawn, and inside it, squeezed onto its one small stool and turned toward the little window where the camera is, are two clowns. The man in the grey suit sits up straight with the paper bag on his lap and looks into the window with his eyes open, the way you look when you are hoping the picture will come out well this time. The old clown with the cracked paint and the copper on his cheek has let his head come to rest on the younger man's shoulder. He has had his picture taken in this booth before. He knows how it comes out. Nobody crossing the hall looks at them, and the machine is about to ask again.