By Michael Every of Rabobank

Friday saw US payrolls do their usual comic thing and prove the ADP employment print using ostensibly the same methodology earlier entirely wrong. Jobs were 139K vs. 126K consensus with an unchanged 4.2% unemployment rate and average hourly earnings up 0.4%, a tick more than expected. Some pointed to a huge drop in the household survey which could mean a downturn and deflation ahead; and others pointed to those same perhaps being illegal workers exiting stage left under the new White House, so a boom led by wage inflation. Who can tell at this stage? Not anybody looking at an Excel spreadsheet, surely.

Moreover, if you think that’s all that’s going on you must have spent the weekend deep in a cave, high on a mountain, or on a yacht heading towards the East Med.

In politics, former Democrat presidential candidate Andrew Yang says he’d like to join a new Musk libertarian American Party that backers claim would be supported by 80% of Americans… while slashing federal programs 80% of Americans want to retain. That’s as Trump, who said he has no desire to repair his rift with Musk, warned there would be “very serious consequences” if he sided with the Democrats - though a third party would do damage enough to Republicans itself, as one source wildly claimed Trump may even ban X for national security reasons.

California Governor Newsom floated withholding federal taxes as Trump threatened to do the same with federal funding for California; and as we heard US Treasury Secretary Bessent had attacked Elon Musk, riots started in LA with the National Guard called in despite the Governor not wanting to use them, or to direct them himself.

Meanwhile, UK “policing is broken”, says The Telegraph, as officers quit in droves, also with an op-ed that the country is “heading for oblivion.’ In the background, former Reform Party Chair Yusuf announced his return two days after quitting to lead a ‘Doge team’ inspired by Musk; and that’s as other media talk of a split in the governing Labour Party between its left and centrist wings.

In short, politics almost everywhere continues to show flux and polarization as a result of being able to propose any workable --or at least quick or painless-- solutions to our multiple conflating problems. And let me underline again that tariffs aren’t either, whatever happens from here.

In markets, Trump not only called for a 100bps Fed cut(!) at the next meeting, upping the ante there, but he said a new Fed Chair would be named soon – so do we soon get a shadow Fed Chair working alongside Powell, presumably to undermine his authority, and if so who, and will the market then listen to them?

And in energy, India is following Germany (de facto), and China, and the US (de jure) in burning more coal as its energy demand surges far beyond what renewables can provide; as Beijing reportedly worries about what’s happening in China’s over-built EV sector, as both its CPI and PPI prints both stayed negative and even export growth dipped while import growth, of course, shrank.

But apart from all that, not a lot is happening.