Core CPI came in hotter than expected, pushing rate hike odds near 90%. Treasury's buyback underfilled and yields held near multi-year highs. Diesel broke $6. Oracle burned cash at record pace. The Pentagon is in talks to lend $5B to an AI startup.
CPI Landed Hot on Core. Hike Odds Surged. Futures Bounced.
CPI headline matched expectations. Core came in hotter than forecast. Hike odds jumped to nearly 90 percent. S&P 500, Dow, and Nasdaq futures all rose sharply. Four-day losing streak snapped. The 10-year yield eased slightly. WTI pulled back after four days of gains.
Oracle (ORCL) jumped premarket after a big earnings beat. Adobe (ADBE) slipped after in-line guidance. Enflame, a Chinese chipmaker, surged over 200 percent on Shanghai debut. Bessent confirmed a large bank will be sanctioned Monday. European stocks opened higher. Asia-Pacific fell sharply before the CPI print.
Payrolls added 162,000 jobs last month. Three times consensus. That removed the cover for a hold. Core CPI at 0.3 percent removed what was left.
Investor Signal
Waller said hold at 0.2 percent, hike if hot. Core printed at 0.3 percent. Wells Fargo called it: the Fed should hike next week. The yield curve, swaps, and futures all agree. A hold now is the surprise.
The Big AI Story Nobody Knows
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There's a website called RentAHuman.ai. Its tagline: "Robots need your body."
721,000 people across 100 countries have signed up.
And according to Alexander Green - the man who bought Apple under $1, Netflix at $1.62, Amazon under $2* - this is the clearest signal yet that Phase 2 of the AI supercycle has arrived. (Split adjusted prices)
He's identified three companies set to dominate this next phase.
Treasury Underfilled Its Own Buyback. Yields Ignored It.
The Treasury bought only $5.2 billion of the $6 billion authorized. Sellers offered more than $10 billion. Treasury can only buy at market prices. It left the rest on the table. A $22 billion 30-year auction also went poorly. Yields rose after both.
The 10-year settled at its highest close since October 2023. The 30-year moved through BMO's Ian Lyngen's line in the sand. The sharpest moves were in the 3-year and 5-year. When the middle of the curve outruns the long end, the market is pricing a rate hike, not a debt crisis.
What the Underfill Reveals
- Treasury's market-price rule prevents it from buying aggressively enough
- Each underfill makes the next announcement less credible
- Cutting long-end issuance at November refunding is the real lever
Al-Hussainy named the risk before CPI: a hold would make long yields disorderly. Core at 0.3 percent settled it. A hold is now the disorderly outcome.
After the Print
The 10-year eased slightly after CPI. Not because inflation was soft. A hike pushes the short end up and the long end down. The curve is repricing a cycle, not just a premium.
Diesel Hit $6 for the First Time. Refiners Cannot Rebuild Before Winter.
Diesel passed $6 a gallon for the first time ever. Up nearly 60 percent since February. WTI crossed $100 this week before pulling back. Diesel inventories sit 13 percent below the five-year average. The crack spread hit a record.
Middle Eastern and Russian refineries are offline. China is restricting fuel exports. Maintenance season starts soon. Rapidan says stocks cannot be rebuilt over the next two months.
Where Diesel Goes Next
Fuel is 15 to 30 percent of some food prices. Heating oil may approach $5.55 this winter. Both are costs CPI has not fully captured yet. Swonk put it simply: diesel enters other prices with a lag. CPI is the start of this, not the full measure.
ICE. The Epstein Files. Tariffs.
That’s what the media wants you to focus on.
But behind the scenes, it seems President Trump is quietly preparing something far more shocking — that will leave even his most loyal MAGA patriots stunned.
It’s NOT being debated on cable news or on X.
But it could make you enormously rich in the second half of 2026.
Oracle Beat Revenue and Burned Through Cash to Get There.
Oracle beat on revenue and earnings. Cloud infrastructure more than doubled. New AI contracts topped $30 billion in the quarter. The stock surged premarket.
Capex soared to $28.5 billion in a single quarter. Free cash flow went deeply negative. Debt stands at $125 billion. Oracle is making hyperscaler-size bets on a balance sheet the ratings agencies do not treat as hyperscaler-grade.
Contract Book vs Credit Profile
- Power and permits are required before backlog converts to revenue
- Oracle is still pursuing an air permit for one active site
- Free cash flow went from slightly negative to deeply negative in one year
A $664 billion backlog is real. The credit profile behind it is not hyperscaler-grade. That gap will show up next quarter.
Borrowing Into a Rate Hike
Oracle services $125 billion of debt. That debt just got more expensive. The contract wins are real. The financing environment got harder at the same time.
Pentagon in Talks to Lend $5 Billion to an AI Startup.
The Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital is in talks to lend $5 billion to Fluidstack, an AI cloud startup. Largest OSC loan by far. The money targets data center supply chain capacity, not a facility directly.
Erebor Bank, founded by Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, is advising Fluidstack. Google backstops its leases. Jane Street holds the equity at $18 billion. The Pentagon may supply $5 billion of debt on top.
Three balance sheets behind one startup. None of them is Fluidstack's own.
How Federal AI Lending Works Now
OSC has authority for over $200 billion in financing. Prior deals included equity warrants. JPMorgan estimates $4.1 trillion in AI infrastructure financing through 2030. The Pentagon is not rescuing Fluidstack. It is taking a position early in that queue.
"A Dangerous Financial Plan Unfolding in D.C. Could Cost You 40% of Your Wealth"
Former Goldman Sachs executive who traded through Black Monday warns this plan is all written down in black and white, spearheaded by a financial insider who infiltrated the Federal Reserve... It's gone "viral" in the hedge fund circles… and yet practically nobody on Main Street understands this financial shock playing out across America. He lays out all the evidence... plus a detailed roadmap for exactly what to do. (And it doesn't require shorting... options... or perfectly "timing the market.")
You must see this critical market briefing today.
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Anthropic Named Three Labs in 200 Million Distillation Exchanges.
Anthropic's report names Alibaba (BABA), Moonshot, and DeepSeek in nearly 200 million distillation exchanges. The Alibaba campaign alone: 151 million exchanges. About 3,500 fraudulent accounts. One coordinated effort.
Moonshot routed real Kimi users to Claude without telling them. It saved Claude's responses as training data. DeepSeek ran similar tactics over 14 days in July.
Some exchanges included sensitive data from multinational companies and state actors. Routed to a U.S. provider without users knowing.
Cost Advantage Has a Number Now
- 200 million exchanges is not an allegation. It is a dataset.
- Token prices at record lows are partly explained by not paying to train
- Three government-named labs now have receipts behind the accusation
Anthropic published this weeks before its IPO. The S-1 will have to address it. Whether this is a moat or a liability is one of the year's biggest disclosure questions.
Sequencing Is the Story
Governments named the labs. Anthropic provided the evidence. Formal designation is next. Whether it lands before or after the IPO window changes the filing materially.
Core CPI at 0.3 percent finished what payrolls started. The Fed heads into September 16 with no case for a hold.
Treasury's buyback underfilled. Yields ignored it. Diesel broke its record with no rebuild path before winter. Oracle signed $30 billion of AI contracts while burning cash its credit profile cannot sustain. The Pentagon is lending at a scale that reshapes how AI gets financed. Anthropic handed regulators the receipts for what three agencies already alleged.
September 16. Four days. That’s what the market will be pricing for in the coming days.
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