Hey guys, happy Friday. Hope you're well.
Money moved fast this week. Let's slow it down and see what we caught.
Here's our take on what's happening out there, and what we actually think about it. Grab a coffee, let's get into it.
💵 COST OF CAPITAL
The Fed is expected to hike again next week with inflation still stuck at 3.4%, which keeps mortgages, car loans, and credit cards expensive. We think rates stay higher for longer than the market is pricing, so don't bet on cheap money coming back this year.
🇺🇸 At home
Metric | Level | What it means |
|---|---|---|
Fed funds | 3.50 to 3.75% | Loans about to cost more |
10-yr Treasury | ~4.98% | Mortgages, credit stay pricey |
CPI (YoY) | 3.4% | Prices still rising too fast |
GDP | +1.5% | Growth cooling, not stalling |
30-yr mortgage | 6.81% | Buyers frozen out |
Federal deficit | ~$2T | More debt lifts rates |
Gold | ~$4,345 | Fear trade still on |
🌍 Abroad
Metric | Level | What it means |
|---|---|---|
ECB | 2.50% | Europe cutting to help growth |
Bank of Korea | 3.00% | Korea cooling an AI boom |
BOJ | 1.25% | Japan tightening, slowly |
BOE | 3.75% hold | UK on hold, watching |
KOSPI | ~6,910 | AI chips minting fortunes |
Korean won | ~1,342 | Weak won, slowly recovering |
Global bonds | Selloff | Borrowing costs rising everywhere |
EM | Pressured | Strong dollar squeezing them |
💸 MONEY MOVES
The IPO window just cracked open after a long freeze, with NSE, Musinsa, and Oura all lining up to list. When exits reopen, capital starts flowing back into private deals, and we read this fall's listings as the real test of whether risk appetite is back for good.
🇺🇸 Domestic
Deal | Sector | Size |
|---|---|---|
Nvidia → Hugging Face | Tech | $12.9B |
GE Aerospace → CPP | Industrials | $11.75B |
Independence Realty ↔ Centerspace | Real Estate | $8.1B |
Jefferies direct-lending fund | Finance | $4B |
Crusoe | AI infra | $3B |
Oura (IPO filing) | Consumer | >$16B val |
🌍 International
Deal | Sector | Size |
|---|---|---|
NSE India IPO | Finance | ~$46B val |
Musinsa (Korea) | Consumer | ~$6B |
Mistral AI (France) | Tech | €3B |
Bending Spoons → Miro | Tech | $1.36B |
JTC take-private (UK) | Finance | £2.7B |
⚡ ENERGY & COMMODITIES
Oil broke $100 on a tanker war choking the Strait of Hormuz, and that pushes straight through to gas prices and headline inflation. The bigger move underneath is capital racing to lock power for AI, and we think that bidding war outlasts the oil spike.
🌐 Prices
Commodity | Level | Week |
|---|---|---|
Brent | ~$104.9/bbl | ▲ ~9% |
WTI | ~$99.7/bbl | ▲ strong |
US natgas (Henry Hub) | $2.80/MMBtu | ▼ soft, decoupled |
EU natgas (TTF) | ~€80/MWh | ▲ elevated |
US gasoline (AAA) | $4.30/gal | ▲ +13¢/wk |
Gold | ~$4,345/oz | ▼ ~1.5% |
Silver | $64.4/oz | ▼ ~1% |
Copper | $6.48/lb | ~flat |
Uranium | ~$90/lb | flat |
Lithium | ~$20k/t | ▼ 1-mo low |
⚡ Power for AI — the week's grab for electrons.
Deal | What | Size |
|---|---|---|
Google + DOE | Restart Iowa nuclear plant | $1.9B loan |
Google → Fervo | Geothermal, Utah data center | 396 MW |
Williams | Pipelines for data centers | $5.5B |
Shell → ARC | Natural gas supply | $13.9B |
Flex → EPC | Data-center power gear | $4.4B |
🌍 The East — who controls the barrels and the minerals.
Region | Move | What it means |
|---|---|---|
Russia | Urals back above $80 | Price cap squeezing revenue |
China | Crude imports down 37% | Refiners balking at $100 oil |
China | Rare-earth exit ban | Tightening its mineral grip |
Power of Siberia 2 is still deadlocked. Watch the Sept 24 Xi and Trump summit.
🔌 THE NEW BOTTLENECK IS POWER
Energy is finally getting priced into the AI trade.
Google is behind the restart of a nuclear plant in Iowa that shut in 2020. The Energy Department closed a loan of up to $1.9 billion for it, and Google signed a contract to buy the power for 25 years. It signed a separate geothermal deal for a data center in Utah.
The pattern repeats across the week. Williams put $5.5 billion into pipelines aimed at data centers. Shell paid $13.9 billion for a natural gas producer. Flex agreed to buy EPC Power for $4.4 billion, the gear that turns raw power into usable data center load. Crusoe reportedly raised $3 billion to build the data centers themselves.
None of these are utility bills. They are supply deals. A data center earns nothing until it is powered, and the grid can no longer connect new demand fast enough. Interconnection queues now run over five years. Power, not chips, is the constraint.
Now the arbitrage. Restarting a reactor like this one delivers power at around $110 per MWh, fixed for 25 years. That looks steep next to today's wholesale power, which runs about $40 to $50. But that cheap power is not actually on offer. It is already spoken for, and AI demand is pushing the open market higher fast. Federal forecasters expect wholesale power at one Texas hub to climb as much as 79% by 2027 on data center load alone.
So the choice is not $110 against $45. It is a locked $110 for 25 years against an open market these same buyers are about to inflate. Fixing the price is the whole trade.
All of this sits against an oil market moving the other way. Brent crude crossed $100 for the first time since late July, on a US and Iran conflict choking the Strait of Hormuz. The US emergency oil reserve has sat below 300 million barrels since August, its lowest since 1983. One kind of energy is being bought for what it will be worth in a decade. The other is being repriced by a single shipping lane today.
🎯 THE DECISION DESK
Saw this online.
The Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF ($BWET) started the year under $20 and now trades near $650, up more than 3,000%.
The caption: "trading crude oil is for chumps, real mfers trade the tanker etf." The logic holds.
BWET tracks the price of moving oil, not oil itself, so when Hormuz gets choked and tankers reroute, freight rates explode far harder than crude does. It has lapped oil and energy stocks all year.
The same poster added that with the Houthis now hitting Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline, oil gaps up on the reopen, and the easy exposure is $USO for WTI and $BNO for Brent. Not advice, just the wildest chart on the timeline.
📊 THE FLOOR
THE POWER TRADE
The real bottleneck for AI is now:
THE TANKER TRADE
A tanker ETF is up 3,000%+ this year on the oil chaos. Your move:
WHERE'S THE MONEY HIDING
Rates rising, oil over $100, gold near records. Best place to be right now:
Disagree? Reply and tell us where you'd put it.
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