Dario Amodei asked the industry to slow down, Altman and Musk agreed, and the only thing that actually slowed was the chip complex. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Monday, September 14, 2026.
Friday was a relief rally. The S&P closed up about nine tenths of a percent, the Dow about a percent, and the week still finished lower. August CPI came in near enough to consensus that everyone called it calm: 3.4 percent headline, core at 2.4, and gasoline alone doing more than a third of the monthly increase. Oil had come off its high after Iranian state media said Tehran would meet the Gulf states in Oman to talk about the strait. That was enough.
Then Saturday. Amodei published an essay asking the industry to pace the frontier, Altman and Musk said they agreed, and Altman separately told Fortune that an OpenAI listing this year would be ill-advised, pushing it to 2027. Overnight the Nasdaq 100 futures fell about 1.6 percent. Nvidia (NVDA) was off roughly two percent before the bell, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel (INTC) worse. The tape read three essays as a change in the capital expenditure schedule. No order was cancelled.
What nobody wants to look at is Wednesday. Fed funds futures put the odds of a quarter-point hike near 85 percent, and Kevin Warsh will then explain that inflation has to come down. The inflation is a barrel of oil. The US and Iran have been at this since February, most of the traffic through Hormuz has stopped, the Saudi East-West pipeline is shut after attacks, and diesel set a record last week. Raising the price of money does many things. It does not move a tanker.
I spent Sunday with the 1979 transcripts, which I do not recommend. The parallel is sitting right there and it is also wrong. Volcker hiked into an Iranian oil shock too, but he inherited double-digit inflation and no credibility at all, and Warsh inherits 3.4 and an index a percent off its record. Half a parallel is worse than none. What does travel across the decades is the tone of those meetings, careful men agreeing that the supply side is not their department.
Today the calendar is empty, which is a mercy. Retail sales land Wednesday morning alongside the decision, Philly Fed and claims Thursday, and the retail number will hold attention for about forty minutes.
We closed Exelon (EXC) on Friday, down about five percent over twenty trading days against the S&P's one and three quarters over the same stretch. It went out on time rather than on its stop: twenty sessions is this desk's maximum hold, and the position got there without breaking. The August note said a wires utility is a spread trade against the 10-year, and that at 4.7 percent the spread was thin. The 10-year went to 4.96. That was the trade.
Levels, and gold quotes are a few dollars apart this morning depending who you ask: gold near $4,310, WTI at $102.52, Bitcoin around $77,700, S&P futures off about 0.7 percent, the 10-year at 4.96 percent and visibly enjoying the attention.
By Wednesday evening we will all be experts on why a war in the Gulf is a monetary problem. See you tomorrow.
Salomon