Macro Pilgrim's Ledger | May 17, 2026
Iran energy shock drives inflation surge as Kevin Warsh confirmed as Fed chair and Trump's Beijing summit yields limited results
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One hundred issues. That gets one sentence.
The rest earns its own words, because this week had three of them: inflation, succession, and Beijing. In five trading days, April CPI and PPI delivered the hottest back-to-back inflation prints since 2022, the Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh as the 17th chair of the Federal Reserve by the narrowest margin in the modern era, and the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing closed without binding commitments on any of the questions that actually matter.
Through all of it, the VIX closed at 18.
You know the pattern by now.
Inside: a full breakdown of the week’s macro and monetary policy developments, technical reads across 25 global markets, commercial positioning in gold, silver, and copper, and the week-ahead calendar led by NVIDIA’s Q1 earnings on Wednesday...the single most consequential corporate event of the quarter for the AI capex thesis.
One hundred issues. The work doesn’t change.
