Fourth Fed Hawk | PE Firms Hacked | Copper Record | Jane Street Goes Dark

Airbnb Surged. Cloudflare Surged. Payrolls Are the Number Everyone Is Waiting For.

Airbnb (ABNB) jumped roughly 8% in premarket on a strong earnings beat. Cloudflare (NET) surged roughly 16% on a solid full-year outlook.

WTI edged higher. Iran published a Hormuz draft banning U.S. and Israeli ships and demanding compensation from others. Trump said the war ends soon. Iran called it theater diplomacy. The oil relief trade is under pressure again.

Stocks are heading for a second straight winning week. The Nasdaq is set for its best week since May. The macro divergence, rates going hawkish while risk assets grind higher, is what makes payrolls the only number that matters today.

The Signal

The payrolls number today arrives into the most hawkish Fed communication week since rates were hiked in 2023. Four named voices now point toward September. A hot print confirms them. A soft one buys Warsh one more meeting. Gold is heading for its best week since January. The bond market is not convinced the easing story is over, and neither is the hike story.

Musalem Said the Fed Should Have Hiked Last Week. That Is Four Hawks in Five Days.

St. Louis Fed President Musalem said Thursday he wanted a 25 basis point hike at the July meeting. His reasoning was specific: inflation will likely stay above 2% at current policy. He added that earlier gradual hikes are less disruptive than later, more abrupt ones.

The public voice count is now four: three regional dissents from Hammack, Kashkari, and Logan, Cook's Wednesday statement that she is "prepared to act," and now Musalem. Daly said the Fed should be prepared to take action if needed, but stopped short of joining that group. Warsh has given nothing. Bessent publicly endorsed his silence.

The Count

• September FedWatch odds moved sharply higher after Cook's Wednesday statement
• The 30-year Treasury yield is holding near multi-year highs heading into payrolls

The September Gate

Payrolls arrives into a market that has priced the hawkish scenario. A miss forces a rapid unwind. A beat adds momentum. Very little neutral ground exists between those two outcomes.

Hackers Hit Blackstone, Apollo, KKR, Bridgewater, and Moody's. The Method Was a Phone Call.

Google disclosed that hackers built 72 malicious websites targeting Blackstone (BX), Apollo (APO), KKR (KKR), TPG (TPG), Bridgewater, Bain, CME Group (CME), Clearlake, and Moody's (MCO).

The method was not sophisticated. Attackers called IT help desks, impersonated staff, and harvested multi-factor codes live over the phone. Google's own threat analyst called it not sophisticated, just really effective.

This is the fifth hacking disclosure in a week. The target list escalated from AI labs to hedge funds to the entire private equity establishment in five days.

The Target List

• Google confirmed 72 malicious websites built specifically for this campaign
• Finra contacted member firms; this is now a sector-wide advisory event

The target list is the specific signal that published itself. Every enterprise cybersecurity budget officer just read it. Palantir's (PLTR) sovereign AI framework, which isolates customer data from all external pipelines, is the specific product built for exactly this institutional moment.

The Commercial Window

Palantir surged 26% on 149% U.S. commercial growth. The customer list it needs to close in Q3 just appeared on the Google threat report. The hacking wave compressed the sales cycle.

Copper Hit an All-Time High. The Reason Is Supply, Not Demand.

US copper futures hit roughly $6.90 per pound yesterday, an all-time record.

Bank of America's head of metals research said the move was driven by supply, not copper demand. Chile faced disruptions. Congo banned copper and cobalt concentrate exports. Section 232 tariffs at 50% on semi-finished copper are constraining imports. New mines take roughly a decade to build.

China announced a $574 billion power grid upgrade and data center demand is accelerating. But the record is being set at the supply ceiling, not the demand floor. That is a different inflation signal than markets usually read from copper.

The old rule was rising copper meant rising growth. The new rule is rising copper might mean tariff-driven supply shortages in the exact input to every data center being built.

The Supply Stack

• New copper mines take roughly a decade to build, so supply cannot respond quickly
• China's $574 billion grid upgrade is adding demand pressure on top of the supply crunch

Copper at a record on supply constraints is the tariff pass-through Cook named when she voted to hold. The inflation channel just got a specific new data point.

The Data Center Connection

Every gigawatt of data center capacity requires massive copper. The same crunch limiting homebuilders is limiting the infrastructure buildout. That irony is priced into a record high.

Jane Street Wants to Refinance $11 Billion Into Private Credit to Disappear From Public View.

Jane Street is negotiating with Pimco and others to refinance $11 billion in public bonds into a private credit deal up to $15 billion. Public bondholders see quarterly financials. Private lenders see far less.

When numbers get this good, the reason to disclose disappears. Jane Street is going dark at the exact moment its results are peaking.

The Opacity Trade

• The Dallas and New York Feds launched a private credit survey the same week
• Pimco is the lead lender, a specific signal that institutional demand for the deal is real

If Citadel and Susquehanna follow, the public disclosure framework for major market makers unwinds.

IBM Lost $69 Billion in a Day. SaaS Is Being Publicly Declared Dead.

The WSJ called it the SaaSpocalypse. IBM (IBM) lost $69 billion in a day after customers shifted from software to AI hardware.

Airtable sold for $1.3 billion, down from an $11 billion private valuation. Workday (WDAY), Salesforce (CRM), and Adobe (ADBE) are all down more than 30% from peak.

AI agents are replacing tools. Every SaaS multiple now gets repriced against the probability it ends up inside Claude or ChatGPT.

That framing is now the institutional read on every application software valuation.

The Displacement List

• Airtable sold at 88% below its last private valuation
• Insight Partners is telling portfolio companies to double AI revenue targets

SaaS companies that successfully pivot to AI agents survive this cycle. The ones that do not become acquisition targets at 80% discounts. The M&A wave that follows is the specific institutional opportunity set Jana and Toms Capital have already started pricing.

The Acquisition Layer

Companies left behind by AI are cheap for the first time in a decade. Activist campaigns and strategic buyers are moving simultaneously. Q3 calls from Workday, Salesforce, and Adobe get graded on AI transition, not revenue.

Musalem became the fourth voice pointing at a September hike. Hackers hit the biggest names in private equity with a phone call. Copper hit a record on supply constraints, not growth. Jane Street is choosing to go dark on financials. And SaaS is being publicly buried by the companies that built it.

Payrolls arrived today. Everything else waits for what that number says about September.