Two of the biggest stories today are about what the numbers don't say: Treasury's bond buybacks can't tame yields, and Alphabet's $99B 'profit' is mostly paper. Meanwhile Nvidia actually did double revenue, and the consumer outlook just broke below the recession line.
Treasury Secretary Bessent's pledge to ramp up long-bond buybacks was supposed to cap yields. It hasn't: the 30-year sits near 5.24%, a 19-year high, even as the government promises more tools. Traders see a Treasury unable to manage a $40 trillion debt pile, with bond vigilantes effectively dictating terms. And the cost isn't just Wall Street's, mortgage, car and credit-card rates move with those yields.
Nvidia booked a record $96.2B in the quarter ended July, up 106% year over year, with GAAP earnings per share at $2.46 and data center carrying roughly 90% of sales. The real signal was the steer forward: Q3 guidance of $108B, plus CFO commentary pointing to about 70% growth in fiscal 2028. Jensen Huang framed it as an "inflection point" where AI compute has become revenue, as multiple frontier labs and startups scale at once.
Salesforce shares leapt on a fiscal Q2 beat and raised guidance, but the gaudy 87% net-income jump hides an uncomfortable truth: $2.6B of it came from marking up its Anthropic stake, not selling software. Revenue rose 11% to $11.35B, and Agentforce annualized bookings topped $1.5B, up 240%.
Alphabet's Q2 net income hit a record $112.1B, but $99B of it came from unrealized gains on early stakes in SpaceX and other companies, not from selling anything. Its actual business profit, operating income, was $40.8B, up 30%. The mark-to-market balloon flatters the 16x P/E, hiding a far less dramatic story underneath.
After trade talks collapsed Friday, Trump vowed that Canadian cars, trucks, auto parts and steel will carry a 50% tariff starting Jan. 1, doubling today's 25% auto duty. Canada has promised dollar-for-dollar retaliation, and Ontario's Doug Ford has threatened to cut U.S. access to electricity. The trade war will push up prices for American car buyers and stress an auto chain that's deeply integrated across the border.
The Conference Board's Expectations Index tumbled 5.8 points to 68.2 in August, back below the 80 level that has historically flagged a recession within 12 months. All three forward components worsened, even as the Present Situation Index improved. That split, today feels tolerable, tomorrow looks worse, keeps the downturn question very much alive.
Meta ended a landmark bellwether trial in Oakland, Michigan, agreeing to pay states up to $17.1 billion over claims its platforms hooked and harmed kids. Beyond the money, Meta must overhaul Instagram and Facebook: cutting overnight and in-school alerts, adding break prompts, and independent safety audits. The full payout only lands if Snap, TikTok and YouTube cut similar deals.
OpenAI's data center chief, Chris Malone, is out after just 18 months, joining a wave of executive exits ahead of its expected IPO. He oversaw a footprint meant to hit roughly $600 billion in compute spend by 2030, so his departure lands at a fragile moment. It also hits as data centers become an election-sleeper issue in Washington. OpenAI says the team it has is "strong" and "deeply experienced," but investors are watching the churn closely at an $852 billion valuation.
DOJ and the FBI seized QScan and QTRouter, two platforms built by China's state-sponsored QTFY group, after a spate of intrusions into NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Energy, the DOJ, the NIH, and the U.S. Senate. The domain seizures cut off the command-and-control infrastructure the intruders used to hide their tracks. It's the clearest sign yet that Washington now goes after adversaries' infrastructure, not just names them and walks away.
SpaceX is putting $100 billion into a 125,000-acre complex called Starbase Louisiana on the Gulf Coast, slated to start construction in 2027 with launches as early as 2029. At full buildout it will host over a dozen launch towers and more than 30 Starship flights a day. Musk calls it the biggest launch site on Earth by cadence, not footprint. Louisiana expects more than 11,000 direct and indirect jobs.
You’re caught up.
That was all 10 stories in the 27 August issue.