faultlinesweekly

A Sign Change Is Not a State Change The spread between the 10-year and 2-year Treasury yields stood at +0.50 percentage points on 20 August 2026 — the 10-year at 4.69%, the 2-year at 4.19%, per the Federal Reserve's H.15 release. That is a normally sloped curve, and every monthly average from August 2025 onward is positive as well. Somewhere between April 2024, when the monthly average sat at −0.33 points , and September 2024, when it printed +0.10 , the sign flipped. The narrative attached to that fact runs like this: the inversion was the warning, the un-inversion is the all-clear, and the recession the inversion advertised either arrived quietly or was called off. The problem with that reading is not that it is optimistic. The problem is that it treats one number as one piece of information. The spread is a difference between two independently traded prices, and two prices moving in opposite directions, or in the same direction at different speeds, can produce identical spr...

A price round trip, a volume staircase Two series that describe the same disruption are telling different stories, and the gap between them is the most interesting thing in the second-quarter energy data. The price series has already normalized. EIA monthly average WTI spot ran 64.51 in February 2026, jumped to 91.38 in March, peaked at 102.13 in May, and fell back to 80.46 in July. That is a spike and most of a round trip inside six months — the classic shape of a supply shock that markets decided was temporary. The volume series did not round-trip. U.S. crude oil exports ran 4,043 thousand barrels per day in March 2026, then 5,593 in April and 5,728 in May. The March-to-April move is +38% in a single month. Against the January 2024 – March 2026 average of roughly 4,049 thousand b/d, May sits +41% higher. And this is not a series that normally moves that way: across those twenty-seven months, no single month printed above 4,600. The closest was 4,593 in February 2024. ...

Two administrative clocks are running down inside the critical-minerals system, and both expire before the end of this year. Neither is a mine, a shipping lane, or a price. Both are dates in Chinese regulatory announcements, and how they resolve will do more to set magnet availability in 2027 than any tonnage figure published between now and then. The first is 10 November 2026 . On 7 November 2025, China's Ministry of Commerce issued Announcement No. 70, suspending six export-control announcements dated 9 October 2025 — Nos. 55, 56, 57, 58, 61 and 62 — through that date. The second is 27 November 2026 , the expiry attached to Announcement No. 72 of 9 November 2025, which suspended Article 2 of Announcement No. 46 of 2024, the provision barring U.S.-bound shipments of gallium, germanium, antimony, graphite and superhard materials. A suspension is not a repeal. Nothing was struck from the control list; the instruments were parked with a return date attached. That distinction is t...

A headline reporting that foreign central banks are "dumping" U.S. Treasuries almost always rests on one monthly number pulled from one table. The number is usually real. What it measures, how late it arrives, whether it describes reserve managers at all, and whether anything was actually sold are four separate questions — and they are answered by three different published series that frequently disagree with each other. As of mid-August 2026, all three point in the same direction for the first time in a while. Official holdings are down on the Treasury's own survey, down on the Federal Reserve's weekly custody line, and down over a multi-year window. That convergence is worth taking seriously. It is also the exact circumstance in which the reasons matter far more than the direction, because at least four unrelated mechanisms produce an identical-looking decline. Foreign-Held U.S. Treasuries TIC survey, June 2026 · total $9,299.0 billion Offic...