Effective immediately

The deeper account

On Sunday the President told Axios that Iran's proposal for a seven-day ceasefire was not good enough. "They want to make a deal, but it is not the deal that I want to make," he said. "It is what we would have maybe agreed to a year ago. They overplayed their hand." He said he expected more talks this week. On Monday oil and Treasury yields went up and the S&P 500 opened at 7,721.70, 21.71 points below Friday's close of 7,743.41. It spent the morning going down: to 7,697.57 in the first seven minutes, and to 7,666.60 at 10:55, 76.81 below Friday. Brent crude traded above $100 a barrel before it fell back; the ten-year Treasury yield rose to about 5.24 percent, its highest since 2007 — the wires put it anywhere from 5.23 to 5.25 — and the thirty-year to about 5.56, its highest since 2004.

At noon the index stood at 7,684.50. At 12:16 it rose 10.49 points in a single minute, at 12:20 another 9.29, at 12:26 another 11.52, and at 12:27 it touched 7,724.15: 40.01 points above the close of the 12:15 minute, in twelve minutes. The wires tied the move to reports from Axios and from CNN, each citing American officials, that the President was willing to ease sanctions and release frozen Iranian funds in return for concrete steps on Iran's nuclear programme. For three minutes the index traded above its own opening print, by as much as 2.45 points, and one of those minutes closed there. It never came nearer to Friday than 19.26. By 12:42 it was back below 7,700. At 13:11 it jumped again, 21.44 points in one minute, to 7,716.98, and nine minutes later it was at 7,701.31. After that it slid through the afternoon, to 7,677.96 at 15:54, and closed at 7,683.69 — 0.45 below where it had been in the minute before the climb began. The reports were worth forty points for about a quarter of an hour and nothing at four o'clock. That evening, after the close, the President wrote that the Axios story was untrue: "I offered them NOTHING!"

Nvidia said on Monday morning that it was adding $150 billion to its share buyback, leaving $235 billion authorized — the largest single buyback authorization in history, by the press's account. The shares rose 1.68 percent, $93.23 billion of market value, on a day the semiconductor fund fell 2.08: AMD −3.61, Micron −2.61, Intel −5.67. Meta, which had hired MongoDB's chief executive that morning, fell 4.79 percent and lost $91.81 billion, within a billion and a half of what Nvidia gained, for reasons the wires put elsewhere — profit-taking after a 13 percent week, and the cost of its artificial-intelligence building. Boeing fell 6.91 percent on a delay to the certification of the 737 MAX 10; Tesla 3.94 after JPMorgan cut its price target ahead of the quarter's deliveries; Snowflake 2.33 on a $3.5 billion convertible bond. Kodiak Sciences, a biotech company in Palo Alto, nearly trebled — up 177.96 percent — after two of its drugs for wet macular degeneration matched Regeneron's Eylea at one year in a late-stage trial.

The Dow fell 347.11 points to 51,481.51 and the Nasdaq Composite 248.34 to 26,820.38; both reconcile exactly with this book's own Friday closes. For the S&P 500 it was the largest fall in percentage terms since 20 August. Three of the eleven sectors rose — health care, staples and energy, none by more than a third of a percent — and communication services fell 1.58, discretionary 1.41 and financials 1.19. On the New York Stock Exchange falling issues outnumbered rising ones by 3.55 to 1, and the equal-weight fund fell 0.65 percent against the index's 0.77. Gold fell about $164 an ounce. The VIX rose to 16.07 from 14.87. Traders put the chance of a rate rise at the Fed's October meeting at 70.3 percent, up from 57.6 a week earlier.

The close left the index 2.45 points below where it finished August, at 7,686.14: the whole of September's gain, with two sessions of the month to go, was gone. By coincidence, and it is only that, the day's high had stood 2.45 points above its opening print. The index is now 115.30 points, 1.48 percent, below the record close of 13 August. The week brings consumer confidence and job openings on Tuesday, the PCE inflation report on Wednesday and September's payrolls on Friday.

Two honest notes. This page does not know what moved the index at 12:16 or at 13:11; it says what the wires tied the midday move to, and it does not know which of the two reports reached the market first. And the closes shown for individual companies and funds are the feed's daily closing prints; the index close is the settled 7,683.69.

In the photograph it is a quarter past twelve in a stone square among office buildings, and the big bronze fountain has just been switched off. Nothing is coming over the lip of its bowl any more; the last of the water is falling in separate drops, and the basin is still ringing where they land. The pigeons have gone up off the rim. On the far side of the basin the man in the grey suit, who came out at lunchtime with his paper bag to make a wish, has just thrown his coin. It hangs in the air above his open hand, a small copper glint, and he is watching it with his eyes open. He has not noticed that the fountain has stopped. Nobody crossing the square has noticed him.