Wall Street limited its losses, with the Nasdaq reopening just over 6% lower at 15,712pts - and the Nasdaq-100 at 17,435 - and the S&P500 down 4.25% at 5,120pts, its lowest level since May 3.
At the time, US stocks were wiping out $2.100 billion in market capitalization: a scenario anticipated at the end of the night after the Tokyo stock market crash.
The Nikkei index fell this morning by 12.4% (the biggest drop in its history, but also over 48 hours with an 18.2% drop), while the Yen soared +4% to 140.7 against the Dollar (+8% in 5 sessions).
Even if the Yen limits its rise to +2% towards 143.8/$, the cornucopia of the 'Carry Trade' (liquidity offered at 0% by the BoJ to the financial markets, and even at negative rates since 2016) suddenly dries up, and a whole castle of cards based on borrowed money and the bet that the Yen will fall forever has just disintegrated.

Other Asian stock markets, such as Seoul and Taiwan, plunged by over 8%, recording the biggest falls in their history.
This is far from being the case on Wall Street: the last 5 minutes of the session were won by the buyers, who reduced the loss by 0.3% on the Nasdaq and the S&P to -3.40% and 16,200, then -3% to 5,185.

This still represents almost $1,500 billion in disintegrated "value", and above all, the VIX was set ablaze at a mark of 62, unseen since September 2008 and mid-March 2020.
This same 'VIX' was at 16.5 last Thursday, a 3.8-fold increase: in the end, a score of +60 at 37.40 (i.e. X 2.4 in 72H).

In addition, the Dow Jones lost over 1,000Pts (-2.6%) at 38,700 and the Russell-2000 suffered the heaviest losses with -3.65% at 2,032, the lowest since May 1: the 'sector rotation' of early summer has broken down.

Against this backdrop of hyper-volatility, it is difficult to determine whether the "figures of the day" have weighed in one direction or the other: what is certain is that, intrinsically, the US "services" PMI came in weak, at 55 versus 55.3 expected and 55.9 in July, confirming a clear slowdown in growth.

The markets had suffered on Friday from the release of a "worrying" US employment report, according to Commerzbank, with only 114,000 new non-agricultural jobs created in July and the unemployment rate up 0.2 points to 4.3%.

The wave of risk-offs initially sent T-Bonds soaring (erasing -12pts), but to illustrate the dizzying volatility that has prevailed since Thursday, the '10-yr' ended unchanged at 3.785%, while the '2-yr' added +3pts to +3.9090% (after -19pts around 3:30 p.m.).
According to the levels tested at 2:30 p.m. in the US, the market was anticipating -50Pts by the FED in September, -50Pts in November and -25 in December, i.e. -125Pts, at over 60%.
Tonight, it would be -50/-25/-25Pts, i.e. 4.25/4.50% by the end of 2024.


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