US Business · Wednesday, 26 August 2026 · Issue 83 · 9 stories

Bessent vs the bond market, Nvidia's circular bet, and labor's vanishing share

Stanley Druckenmiller just called his own protege out for 'price management' in Treasuries. Nvidia's $500B GPU-loan scheme faces its first real test this week. And workers' slice of US income just hit a Depression-era low. Three stories that don't fit a theme, but each one changes how you think about power.

Markets & Indices

Bessent's Treasury Bond-Buying Is 'Price Management,' Even Druckenmiller Says He'll Lose

Backed into a corner by stubborn long-dated yields, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has spent August pushing bond buybacks to talk rates down. Now his loudest critic is his own former mentor: Stanley Druckenmiller calls the intervention "price management," arguing every artificially suppressed basis point shields Washington from fiscal discipline. He warns the Treasury will lose this fight, and a skeptical bond market agrees.

nytimes.com ↗4 min read at source

Iran and Oman float a Hormuz reopening deal, Trump not yet at the table

Iran and Oman reportedly discussed a "phased framework" to reopen the Strait of Hormuz with a permanent navigational corridor, per the official Oman News Agency. Brent slid to $85 on the news, yet Washington hasn't signed on. A deal that clears the world's busiest oil chokepoint, minus the U.S., shifts the global supply picture and the leverage available in it.

fortune.com ↗9 min read at source

Companies & Earnings

Nvidia's AI-Investment Bank Faces Wall Street's Reckoning This Week

Investors get their answer on whether Nvidia's deal machine is genius or a circular bet. The chipmaker has pooled a $500 billion GPU-financing program with BlackRock, Apollo, KKR and Blackstone, effectively lending clients the money to buy back its own chips. Wall Street still pencils a ~$92 billion quarter. Yet Nvidia has beaten estimates on every metric for a year and still fallen the next trading day.

nytimes.com ↗3 min read at source

Sanctioned Russian bank seized Curaleaf shares tied to CEO's offshore firm

Investigation by The Newsground found Credit Bank of Moscow seized 15.5 million Curaleaf shares, worth about $58 million, in late 2023 after Tangela Holdings, a Cyprus firm tied to CEO Boris Jordan through longtime partner Mary Louise Ferrier, defaulted on a $77 million buyback. The world's largest cannabis company never disclosed Tangela by name in any U.S. or Canadian filing, despite taking sizable loans from it.

thenewsground.com ↗12 min read at source

The Fed & Economy

Workers' slice of US income hits 43%, lowest since the Great Depression

Wages and salaries have fallen to roughly 43% of U.S. gross domestic income, their lowest share since the Depression era, per a chart from Fed data that's been making rounds. It isn't a 57% pay cut, the figure excludes employer-paid benefits, but the long-term trend is real: productivity has outpaced pay since the 1970s. The popular culprit? Nixon severing the dollar's tie to gold in 1971.

finance.yahoo.com ↗8 min read at source

Tech & Growth Stocks

Musk pulls SpaceX's orbital AI data center to Q4 2027, riding Nvidia's Vera Rubin

Musk moved SpaceX's first orbital AI data center launch up to Q4 2027, built on a space-optimized Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 rack. The orbital version has to be reworked for radiation, radiator-based cooling, and zero hands-on servicing. SpaceXAI is now the second hyperscaler after Meta to adopt Nvidia's Vera, undercutting AMD and Intel on chip turf. JPMorgan sees orbital compute undercutting terrestrial cost by 2029.

tomshardware.com ↗3 min read at source

Semis and AI-capex stocks just broke their 4.5-year lockstep

The 30-day correlation between AI-capex and semiconductor stocks collapsed from +0.78 to near zero, the weakest in 4.5 years. After four years of lockstep moves, hyperscalers are now trading independently of chipmakers as capex-durability doubts hit semis hardest. J.P. Morgan reads it as investors finally rewarding both sides of the AI value chain at once, a broadening rather than a rotation.

privatebank.jpmorgan.com ↗3 min read at source

US names Korea's Honam cluster, pressing Samsung and SK Hynix to build memory fabs in America

Washington directly named Seoul's 800 trillion won ($577B) Honam cluster for the first time, and read it as a snub. After two days of Lutnick meetings, the US is now demanding Samsung and SK Hynix build front-end memory fabs on American soil. Markets flinched: KOSPI fell 2.66%, SK Hynix dropped 5%. Korea's September announcement may end up a surrender of its AI bet.

techtimes.com ↗14 min read at source

Other

HP signs multi-year patent deal with U.S.-blacklisted Huawei

HP has struck a multi-year global license to use Huawei's WiFi patents, a sign Huawei tech keeps creeping beyond China's borders despite its 2019 U.S. blacklisting. HP insists it's just a standard-essential patent deal, not a strategic partnership. Either way, Huawei gets paid, and American suppliers like Google still can't.

cnbc.com ↗1 min read at source

You’re caught up.

That was all 9 stories in the 26 August issue.