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The Consumer Discretionary Fund, a river of optimism, has surged ahead, while Starbucks’ vessel lags, its hull groaning under the weight of 6% losses. A year is a season, and seasons turn. Still, the company’s ledger bears the scars of a 2% global decline, a quiet lament in the heart of its empire.

Thousands of federal workers across agencies were furloughed at midnight, and President Trump has said that the shutdown could mean permanent layoffs for some federal government workers. A spectacle of bureaucratic impotence, it seems, has been reduced to a game of musical chairs with public servants.

The great market barometers-the S&P 500, the Dow, the Nasdaq-trembled like birch trees in a storm before steadying themselves. Yet beneath this surface agitation, a quieter current stirred. Gold, that ancient refuge, whispered promises of constancy. Bitcoin, the digital émigré, surged 3%-a sly wink from the future.

Reuters, that scribe of corporate gossip with a penchant for anonymity, spilled ink about Qualcomm’s latest dalliance with Arm’s ninth iteration of architectural sorcery. The report, cloaked in the velvet of “sources familiar with the matter,” suggested that Qualcomm’s new PC and smartphone chips would be swathed in Arm’s ninth-generation tapestry. A curious twist, given that the previous day, Judge Maryellen Noreika had dismissed Arm’s plea for a retrial in its legal tango with Qualcomm over Snapdragon X chipsets. One imagines the judge’s gavel striking with the precision of a clockwork automaton, quashing Arm’s hopes while the two companies continued their pas de deux, as if choreographed by a mischievous god of commerce.