Tuesday was another down day for most markets as the US weekly ADP jobs report suggested the labor backdrop is weakening and housing starts sagged. As the FT puts it, 'Oracle's astonishing $300bn OpenAI deal is now valued at minus $60bn.'

Wednesday is mixed so far in Asia for bonds: Australia is seeing its 10-year yield down around 2bps and Japan's equivalent is up 3bp – and neither is what their economies need right now; but there as elsewhere, with K-shapes all over, nasty politics, and worrying geopolitics, what is? That question it tied up with 'who is?'

Treasury Secretary Bessent just said he doesn't want to be Fed Chair but that person will hopefully be named by Xmas – Trump thinks he already knows who he wants . Does anybody think it's going to be a strong, independent, gnostic, hawk deliberately ignorant of geopolitics, who will focus on 2% CPI and clash with the White House and Treasury? I thought not.

Politico reports Spain and Germany are gunning to head the ECB in 2027, with former Bank of Spain governor de Cos, now running the BIS, in a strong position - though moving him could cost Europe its BIS leadership if Trump wants an American to run the central bankers' central bank. Bundesbank president Nagel is mentioned, as is him recently annoying Chancellor Merz in expressing support for Eurobonds for defence purposes. Germany has more hawkish candidates – or it could support one from elsewhere, such as former president of the Dutch central bank Knot.

Markets will soon focus on this rearranging of Chairs… and that it's on the Titanic(?) As noted yesterday, the White House sees the neoliberal, central-bank centric, inflation-targeting world no longer exists: so, logically, it won't exist under the next Fed Chair. Monetary policy and fiscal policy will (further) conjoin, as will FX, trade, defence, industrial, and energy policy – and others to boot. Covering any of those areas will require a real understanding of that connection and the nested hierarchy of national (or bloc) Grand Macro Strategy driving them.  

Is that just a US issue? No. The PBOC operates in a similar fashion, so the world's two largest economies would be outside the neoliberal norm. The Bank of England could follow under Reform. Even Europe will be forced to grapple with serious structural issues, which the Draghi Report argue require bold, original, joined-up thinking - and it's not as if the ECB hasn't changed hugely since its inception.

The real issue will be finding someone who can Chair a central bank as it will need to be run when existing candidates have, by default, been trained on how it used to need to be run. That's not going to be easy. A related issue will be finding financial media and analysts willing to keep up with this dizzying set of conflating changes: that's also going to be a hard sell when most of the specialised and siloed industry is built around CPI or payrolls higher/lower games.