Wall Street puts two-in-three odds on a Fed hike this month, to fight an inflation that is currently sitting in a shipping lane near Iran.
Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Thursday, September 3, 2026.
Yesterday the S&P 500 closed at 7,666.60, up 0.46 percent, the Dow added 295 points to 53,061.95, the Nasdaq 0.45 percent, and all of it rested on one fact: the ten year yield stopped rising for a single session. It touched 4.814 percent on Tuesday, the highest since 2023, and when it eased back the room declared victory. Translation: nothing got better, something merely stopped getting worse, and in the wonderful world of finance that is a rally. Underneath, futures price a two thirds chance of a quarter point hike this month, up from forty percent a week ago, because the president's own Fed chair went to Jackson Hole and pointed at PCE running 3.7 percent over twelve months and 4.1 percent annualized over six. Kevin Warsh was hired to cut. Warsh is going to hike. Jerome Powell, still a governor, is presumably enjoying this more than he will ever say out loud. Who actually won here? Not the White House, and not anyone who bought duration this summer.
And everyone is pretending not to notice that 25 basis points cannot reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Brent is near 95 because Washington and Tehran are trading missiles around it, and the committee's answer to a war premium is to make it costlier for an American cardiologist to refinance an office. Meanwhile Broadcom ($AVGO) grew AI revenue 221 percent to 16.7 billion, promised 230 billion by fiscal 2028, and fell 5 percent after hours for guiding 34.8 billion against 35.03 expected. A quarter of a billion short on a number nobody can forecast.
Today brings jobless claims, services PMI at 8:45, ISM services at 10 expected near 54.5. None of it will matter, because tomorrow at 8:30 the August payroll report lands, consensus around 55,000 with unemployment at 4.1 percent, after a July that printed minus 23,000 and revised the two prior months down by a combined 103,000. A soft number just before a hike the market has already priced is the arithmetic that makes committee members suddenly discover nuance. Watch the two year, not the headline.
The desk closed Centene ($CNC) on Tuesday, up 1.62 percent against an S&P 500 that lost 1.24 percent over the same stretch, an excess of 2.86 points. Twenty trading days, this desk's maximum hold, reached without the stop ever being touched. It closed because the calendar said so, not because anything was resolved. The rule did the work. Nothing more interesting to report, which is roughly the point.
Gold this morning is around 4,440 dollars, though quotes are scattered over twenty dollars and I would not die on any of them, still far below January's 5,597. Brent near 95.25, WTI near 90. Bitcoin around 77,300, which for the asset that was going to hedge geopolitical chaos is a curious way of hedging geopolitical chaos. S&P futures near 7,625, faintly red. The ten year at 4.768, down two basis points, the thirty year at 5.243.
A central bank tightening into a shrinking payroll to punish a missile. Stay sharp, and see you tomorrow at 8:30.