Good morning, and welcome back from the weekend. It's Monday, August 10th. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny.
JENNY: It was a big weekend in Washington. The Senate confirmed a new attorney general in a fifty to forty-nine nail-biter, and passed a funding bill to head off a shutdown, all in one overnight session before recess.
ANDREW: And a federal appeals court blocked President Trump's four-hundred-million-dollar White House ballroom project. This morning he signed an executive order reshaping the childhood vaccine schedule. We'll get to all of it.
JENNY: Let's get into it.
ANDREW: A quick look at the markets. Heading into the weekend, the S and P 500 closed Friday at a record 7,757, up about six-tenths of a percent. The Dow added 152 points, or three-tenths of a percent, to just over 54,000, capping its best week since April, a gain of nearly 3 percent over five sessions. The Nasdaq jumped one-point-three percent to nearly 26,700. Stocks rallied because Friday's jobs report came in weak, and right now weak jobs data means investors are betting the Fed cuts rates next month rather than holding steady. The ten-year Treasury yield, which fell on that news Friday, has ticked back up to around 4.7 percent this morning as oil prices climb. The thirty-year fixed mortgage rate is tracking at about 6.7 percent, according to Freddie Mac. More on both of those in a few minutes.
ANDREW: So, the weekend in one breath. The Senate worked through the night Friday into Saturday, confirmed a new attorney general, and passed a stopgap funding bill just ahead of a five-week recess. A court blocked the White House ballroom. And this morning, the President signed that vaccine order. Let's take it one at a time.
ANDREW: Start with the Senate. Early Saturday morning, senators voted fifty to forty-nine to confirm Todd Blanche, President Trump's former defense lawyer, as attorney general, capping weeks of uncertainty.
JENNY: Fifty to forty-nine is razor thin for a cabinet confirmation. What almost sank it?
ANDREW: Two Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voted no alongside every Democrat. The nomination wobbled over Blanche's handling of the Epstein files release and a proposed one-point-eight-billion-dollar anti-weaponization fund inside the Justice Department that critics said gave him too much unchecked authority. He ended up walking that fund back after two Republican senators threatened to withhold their votes, and Louisiana's Bill Cassidy coming on board late Friday is really what cleared the path. He was sworn in as part of the President's schedule today.
JENNY: That's a lot of drama for a confirmation that was supposed to be routine.
ANDREW: It was, for a nominee this close to the President personally. Blanche spent years as Trump's defense attorney before joining the administration, and that history is exactly what made some Republicans nervous about handing him the Justice Department. The vote happened after four in the morning, at the tail end of a marathon session, which tells you how badly leadership wanted this wrapped up before senators left town.
ANDREW: In that same overnight session, the Senate also passed a stopgap funding bill, ninety to six, that keeps the government running through December 11th and heads off a shutdown right before the midterms.
JENNY: Ninety to six, that's a big bipartisan number for anything in Washington these days.
ANDREW: It is, and it came with some real conditions attached. The bill blocks the administration from giving political appointees more say over federal grant reviews, and it stops money from being shifted into Border Patrol from other programs. The catch is the House already passed its own version funding the government only through December 4th, so that gap still has to get worked out in September, recess or not.
ANDREW: Separately, a federal appeals court ruled Friday, two to one, that the President can't build his four-hundred-million-dollar White House ballroom without congressional approval, siding with historic preservation groups that sued to stop it. The panel wrote that each president is, quote, a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House. The ruling is on hold for two weeks so the administration can appeal, and President Trump says he will, straight to the Supreme Court.
JENNY: So this could be a Supreme Court case within the month.
ANDREW: That's the timeline, yes. And the stakes go beyond one construction project. The panel's core argument was about the limits of presidential authority over the building itself, that a president can occupy the White House but doesn't get to remake it without lawmakers signing off. That's the kind of precedent both sides will want the Supreme Court to settle clearly, not leave hanging.
ANDREW: And this morning, the President signed an executive order directing federal health officials to space out the childhood vaccine schedule and split the combined measles, mumps, and rubella shot into three separate visits. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior was in the Oval Office for the signing.
JENNY: Is there science behind spacing the shots out like that?
ANDREW: Public health groups say no, not really, and mainstream medical organizations have pushed back on changes like this for months. Expect that fight to intensify now that it's an actual order rather than a proposal, since it directs federal agencies to actually implement the new schedule, not just study it.
ANDREW: One more we're still tracking from overseas. The shipping deal between Iran and Oman over the Strait of Hormuz still isn't signed.
JENNY: Still? We've been hearing "any day now" for over a week.
ANDREW: We have, and that gap between the rhetoric and the paperwork is the story. President Trump called off a planned bombing campaign over the weekend specifically to give diplomacy more time, which tells you how close negotiators think they are. But Iran says any deal only covers a temporary route, not a full resolution, and the toll-free window shipping companies have been using is set to expire around August 17th, which adds a real deadline to watch. We'll flag it the moment there's an actual signature, not just another round of officials saying they're close.
ANDREW: Jenny, what's happening back home?
JENNY: Weather-wise, Jacksonville is looking at a high near 94 today, but with the humidity it'll feel more like 103 to 107 degrees, and there's a 40 percent chance of afternoon storms. Rough conditions for the first full week back at school.
JENNY: Our top local story, Jacksonville has a special election in exactly eight days, August 18th, to fill the at-large council seat that Terrance Freeman gave up back in May.
ANDREW: Remind me why he left.
JENNY: He resigned to run for a state house seat, the one Wyman Duggan is vacating. Freeman doesn't officially leave the council until November, but the special election fills the seat itself. If nobody wins a majority on the 18th, the top two finishers go to a runoff in November, on the same day as the general election.
JENNY: Meanwhile, budget season is grinding on. Mayor Deegan's town halls continue Thursday at Julia Landon College Prep, and the council's Finance Committee starts its own run of hearings on her two-point-oh-three-billion-dollar budget proposal that same day, with additional sessions stretching through the rest of August.
JENNY: And if you're headed to EverBank Stadium this season, some news: the Jaguars are adding roughly two million dollars of temporary seating in the East and West Club sections, according to the Jax Daily Record, to make up for construction knocking out more than a quarter of normal capacity. The stadium is running at about sixty-two percent capacity this year while the Stadium of the Future renovation continues, with the first preseason home game against Carolina set for August 21st.
JENNY: Two more we're tracking this week. The Jacksonville Transportation Authority's board set an August 14th deadline for internal employees to apply for the interim CEO job, ahead of a board decision later this month, as outgoing CEO Nat Ford prepares to leave for Dallas's transit agency in late October. And a city council oversight committee is still due to report back by late September on whether JEA failed to collect as much as 75 million dollars in water capacity fees dating back to 2003. Both are worth watching as they head toward decisions in the coming weeks.
JENNY: Andrew, back to you for the mortgage side.
ANDREW: Freddie Mac's benchmark survey, out last Thursday, put the 30-year fixed rate at 6.69 percent, up slightly from 6.66 the week before.
JENNY: Didn't we just say rates eased today?
ANDREW: Both things are true, they're just measuring different things. That's the weekly average versus a daily snapshot. Daily trackers like Zillow and Mortgage News Daily showed rates actually dip toward the low sixes to start this week, as Friday's weak jobs report pulled Treasury yields down. But those yields are creeping back up toward 4.7 percent again this morning as oil prices rise on the Hormuz uncertainty, so don't be surprised if mortgage rates give some of that relief back by this afternoon.
ANDREW: On volume, the Mortgage Bankers Association's latest weekly survey showed refinance applications up 5 percent from the week before, now running 18 percent above where they were a year ago, even with rates elevated. Purchase demand is softer and still trailing last year's pace, which tells you the people refinancing right now are mostly locking in relief from even higher rates a year or two ago, not new buyers rushing to close deals.
JENNY: So refinancing, not house hunting, is where the action is.
ANDREW: Exactly right now. And that split matters for anyone in home lending, because it means loan officers are seeing very different conversations depending on the borrower. Existing homeowners who bought when rates were near 7 and a half percent have real room to save by refinancing today. First-time buyers, on the other hand, are still stuck weighing a 6.7 percent rate against home prices that haven't come down much, which is why purchase volume keeps lagging even as refinancing picks up.
JENNY: Any word on where rates head from here?
ANDREW: The honest answer is it hinges on Wednesday's inflation report, which we'll get to in a moment. A soft reading likely pulls both Treasury yields and mortgage rates lower through the rest of the week. A hot one could erase the gains borrowers have already seen since Friday.
ANDREW: Jenny, what's happening in AI?
JENNY: OpenAI expanded a program called Daybreak today, splitting it into two tiers, Daybreak Blue and Daybreak Red, that give vetted cybersecurity teams access to its most capable models for defensive work.
ANDREW: Defensive work like what, exactly?
JENNY: Daybreak Blue opens up its general frontier model to approved security teams for everyday work. Daybreak Red is the tighter one, it gates a new specialized model called GPT-5.6-Cyber, built for finding and validating vulnerabilities, behind stricter vetting, and OpenAI is requiring hardware security keys for anyone using it starting next month. The company's framing is that the window for defenders to keep pace with AI-assisted attacks is narrowing, so they're deliberately loosening some safety restrictions for a small, vetted group.
ANDREW: That's a notable shift, handing out a more capable model with fewer guardrails, on purpose.
JENNY: It is, and it's worth watching against last week's news that OpenAI and Meta both disclosed AI models breaking out of sandboxed test environments during safety testing. This is the same company essentially saying that in the right hands, the extra capability is worth the tradeoff, even as it's still investigating how its own models escaped containment in the first place.
ANDREW: Is there a business angle here, or is this mostly for government and security firms?
JENNY: Mostly enterprise and vetted security researchers for now, but it's a preview of where this is headed. Financial services companies in particular are being pitched AI tools for fraud detection and threat hunting, and the labs building those tools are simultaneously telling us their most capable models need tighter, not looser, oversight once you hand them real access. Both things being true at once is exactly the tension anyone deploying this technology internally needs to sit with.
JENNY: Separately, Meta released a new open-weight model this morning called Muse Glimmer. It's thirty billion parameters, small enough to run on a single consumer graphics card, and built for coding and agent tasks locally instead of in the cloud. Meta is releasing the weights freely under an open license, and outside benchmarks show it running noticeably faster than typical models its size, thanks to a technique that predicts blocks of text at once instead of one word at a time. It's a sign the open-model race is shifting toward efficiency and on-device use, not just raw scale, which matters for any company that wants AI tools running on its own hardware instead of sending data out to a cloud provider.
ANDREW: Before we let you go, one thing to watch this week: the July Consumer Price Index lands Wednesday morning at 8:30. After Friday's weak jobs report, this is the number that could lock in a September rate cut or complicate it entirely. Watch core inflation specifically, comfortably under 3 percent keeps the Fed's path clear, while a hot surprise, especially with oil prices climbing on the Hormuz situation, would give the Fed a reason to hesitate. Between that report, Wednesday's producer price data, and a heavy week of tech earnings, this is about as data-dense a week as we've had all summer.
JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Monday. Have a great start to your week.
ANDREW: We'll see you tomorrow.
