Markets end a brutal week quietly as Chairman Warsh refuses to signal a rate move and rate hike bets fall back

After a week of inflation shocks and a technology rout, the loudest sound on Wall Street on Friday morning was a central banker declining to say anything.

Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh, speaking at the International Monetary Fund meetings in Bangkok, said the economy was broadly what policymakers expected last month and that he does not prejudge meetings. He declined to endorse colleagues who have signalled the Fed is in no rush to raise rates this month, and he declined to push the other way. Traders took the silence as permission to exhale. The odds of a rate increase at the meeting in two weeks fell to about 13 percent on the CME FedWatch measure, and the ten year Treasury yield held near 5.08 percent, as of Friday morning.

The calm was relative. Futures for the S and P 500 rose about 0.1 percent and Dow futures about 0.2 percent in early trade. The artificial intelligence trade, which carried the week's losses, stayed fragile: CoreWeave, the Nvidia backed computing provider whose soaring borrowing costs helped trigger the flight out of AI names, fell again in premarket trading. Across the full week the market rotated rather than crashed, out of technology and into health care and consumer staples, leaving the Dow heading for a gain of about 1 percent and the Nasdaq for a loss of about 2 percent.

Asia, which took the worst of Thursday, recovered part of it. South Korea's Kospi rose about 2 percent after falling 7.6 percent the day before, and Japan's Nikkei gained about 1.8 percent. Brent crude slipped slightly but held above 105 dollars a barrel, as traders weighed an International Energy Agency plan to accelerate the release of about 100 million barrels from reserves. Gold futures moved back above 4,200 dollars an ounce and bitcoin traded near 82,200 dollars. Tesla shares rose about 4 percent overnight following Thursday night's flying Roadster demonstration in Texas, reported as this site's top story on Thursday.

Next week brings the first of the big technology earnings, including Tesla's numbers, into a market that has started asking what the AI buildout costs rather than what it promises. This report describes published figures and market moves only. It is not financial advice.