Asia drifts into the week like a dimly lit trading floor after a long night of scrolling the news flows — screens glowing, but the room thick with fatigue. Futures are barely flickering, the dollar sits in its cage, and the market’s collective yawn is audible. The real fireworks were supposed to come from Anchorage, but the show fizzled into the kind of summit that produces more handshakes than headlines.

Trump and Putin walked away without a ceasefire, without even the illusion of one. What they did offer was theatre: enough “progress” for Trump to declare victory and quietly holster his double-barreled threat — tariffs on Beijing for buying Russian barrels and sanctions on Moscow’s crude. That faint reprieve was all it took to deflate Thursday’s frantic short-covering scramble. Oil, which had been pulled higher by fear of a sanctions crossfire, is now drifting lower, the artificial bid evaporating like water in the desert.

But Trump, never one to leave the stage empty, teased the next act — a trilateral with Zelenskiy and Putin. The White House is dangling “Article 5-like” guarantees for Ukraine, a security umbrella without NATO actually holding the pole. To Moscow, it’s just words. The Kremlin doesn’t trade on language; it trades on territory. If this play moves forward, Russia will demand something hard and real — land, recognition, the cementing of lines the West still refuses to redraw. For now, it’s theatre dressed up as diplomacy, maximalist scripts read aloud before the negotiations even begin.

Markets, as ever, are less sentimental. The press wrings its hands, the administration spins “critical wins,” but traders know the difference between a contract and an editorial. Anchorage was a small breakthrough — just enough to dress the table, not enough to feed the room. Oil gave back the squeeze, equities tread water, and FX sits stuck between tariffs that never materialized and sanctions that were never signed.

Which brings us to the real playbill: Jackson Hole. This is the market’s summer opera, and Powell is cast as reluctant tenor, forced to sing to an audience that already knows the lyrics. Positioning is one-way: long gold, long bitcoin, long equities, and short the greenback. It’s a dovish hymn sheet, sung in perfect unison — which makes it fragile. Powell doesn’t have to slam the door on September’s cut; that’s already priced and wrapped in a bow. But even the faintest pause, a whisper of “one and done”, and the chorus cracks.

History doesn’t do soft landings once the jobs market tilts. Employment rolls downhill, not sideways, and it takes a series of cuts — each one feeding the next like falling dominoes — to stop the slide. Traders know it. The curve knows it. The danger is that Powell tries to buy time while the market has already mortgaged the future.

So Asia’s open is subdued, more waiting-room than trading floor: crude bleeding lower, equities shuffling sideways to lower, currencies barely twitching. The noise from Alaska is already fading, the whispers of a Kyiv-Moscow handshake drifting like wildfire smoke on a long northern evening, but the real script waits in Wyoming. By Friday, Powell steps onto the stage. And if the words that leave his mouth sound anything like “one and done,” the hymn sheet tears, the chorus collapses, and the market’s summer opera ends not in harmony but in dissonance.

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