So my phone wouldn't stop buzzing this morning. Not texts, not Slack (do we even call it Slack yet at my place, or is it still email chains, I genuinely can't remember which week we're in) — it was the stock ticker app going off every few minutes because Chinese markets tripped their brand new circuit breaker again and the whole thing shut down trading for the day after something like fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! They just built this circuit breaker system on January 1st and it's already broken it twice in the first week.
For anyone who hasn't been half-watching financial Twitter the way I apparently have been instead of doing actual work: the Shanghai exchange rolled out these new rules on the first trading day of the year that pause everything if the CSI 300 index drops 5%, and shut it down completely for the day if it hits 7%. Reasonable idea on paper, stop the bleeding, give everyone a minute to breathe. Except what's actually happened both times it's kicked in is that the pause makes everyone panic more, because now you know the market's about to close and you can't get out, so you all try to sell in the same narrow window before the doors lock. It's a stampede toward an exit that's about to be bolted shut. Somebody in a risk management department somewhere is having a very bad week.
And because markets don't respect time zones or my personal need to sleep, this rolled straight into US trading and dragged tech stocks down with it. Apple's been getting hammered, which matters to me more than it should because a chunk of my compensation is RSUs that vest on a schedule I don't control, and watching that number turn red before I've had coffee is not how I like to start a Thursday. I know, I know, its paper losses until you actually sell, everyone's uncle who works in finance will tell you that. Doesn't make the notification any less annoying.
The CNBC-style coverage of this has been unbearable, by the way. Every anchor doing the same face, the same "markets in turmoil" chyron, oil prices sliding too so they get to say "commodities" in a worried voice. I turned on the TV in the break room for maybe four minutes and it was the same three sentences repeated with different graphics behind them. I'd rather just read the numbers off a spreadsheet, honestly, at least a spreadsheet doesn't try to make me feel something about it.
None of this is really "tech news" in the product-launch sense, I know, but it's the water everyone in this industry is sitting in right now, and it's hard to ignore when your own vesting schedule turns into a mood ring. CES is happening in Vegas this same week and I keep seeing headlines scroll by about it between the market stuff, concept cars and TVs that roll up like a window shade, and it all feels a little disconnected from a morning where the actual story is "a stock exchange accidentally invented a way to make panic worse."
I don't have a tidy theory about whether this is 2008 again or just a rough patch. People who are much smarter than me about markets are arguing both sides right now and neither side sounds especially convinced of itself. What I do know is that Beijing is reportedly already talking about suspending the circuit breaker rule they just introduced less than a week ago, which is either impressively fast course correction or a sign the whole thing was undercooked from the start. Maybe both.
Anyway. I muted the stock app. Not selling anything, not checking again until Friday at the earliest, that's the plan I'm telling myself at 11am on a Thursday. We'll see how long that lasts, given that the last time I made that promise it lasted about ninety minutes before curiosity won.