The Morning Market Briefing

Andrew, Ben, and Tom discuss Meta heading to trial as Kentucky, Colorado, California, and New Jersey allege the platform encourages compulsive use by young people while a broader group of 29 states accuses it of illegally collecting data on children under 13, with potential penalties Meta claims could reach $1.4 trillion though plaintiffs argue the real exposure is closer to $193 billion, Home Depot beating same-store sales expectations despite high financing costs still weighing on large home renovation projects, rising unfilled orders in the Empire State Manufacturing Survey pointing to leaner just-in-time inventory strategies as elevated rates make carrying stock more expensive, and continued stalemate in the Middle East as Iran presses for more control over the Strait of Hormuz, Israel keeps striking in Lebanon, and Gaza ceasefire talks remain stuck.

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Andrew, Ben, and Tom discuss leaked Anthropic second-quarter results showing revenue of $11.5 billion, up 1300% year-over-year and 143% quarter-over-quarter with an annualized run rate crossing $47 billion in May compared to OpenAI's roughly $40 billion at the same point, SpaceX's AI division contributing $2.6 billion in the quarter while posting positive adjusted EBITDA despite an adjusted operating loss, Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT surpassing Tencent to become China's most valuable company with a market cap over $500 billion as capital increasingly shifts from internet platforms to hardware, and Goldman Sachs pushing back on market pricing that it views as too hawkish on the odds of a Fed rate hike.

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Andrew and Tom discuss retail sales falling 0.6% month-over-month against an expected 0.1% gain, with the prior month also revised lower, driving the market-implied odds of a Fed rate hike this year down to 27% from near-certainty just two weeks ago, a weak 30-year Treasury auction that priced at 5.216%, the highest since 2001, with bonds continuing to decouple from cooling inflation and labor data, Trump announcing 100% tariffs on unmanned drones in a further push to decouple supply chains from China, and Cobb County's 5-2 vote greenlighting the Powers Ferry data center despite local opposition.

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Ben and Tom discuss producer prices coming in cooler than expected for a second straight month with headline PPI flat month-over-month and core PPI easing to 4.2% year-over-year, Tom's argument that interest rates remain too high given the $40 trillion national debt after the 10-year auctioned at the highest rate since 2007 and the 30-year approaching its highest since 2001, a breakdown of how portfolio management fees and retail margins are skewing the services component of inflation data, Lenovo surging 20% as AI-related revenue climbs to 35% of total revenue, and Lambda's new $926 million amortizing loan priced at 300 basis points over SOFR as an early example of asset-backed financing structures emerging to fund AI infrastructure buildouts.

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Andrew, Ben, and Tom discuss CoreWeave soaring 17% after raising its 2026 CapEx guidance to $35-39 billion and pushing through roughly 25% price increases across its GPU pricing tiers, extending the useful life of its chips and signing an A100 contract through 2029 despite the SKU launching in 2020, Trump reportedly weighing changes to capital gains taxes including exemptions for homes worth $2 million or less and indexing gains to inflation, a discussion of whether eliminating the corporate income tax and capital gains tax in favor of ordinary income treatment would be simpler and more pro-growth, and a New York State Supreme Court judge temporarily blocking Mayor Mamdani's pied-a-terre tax rollout after finding the city improperly shifted the burden of proving primary-residence exemptions onto property owners, with arguments set for August 31.

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Ben and Tom discuss the $500 billion private-capital AI infrastructure fund unveiled on CNBC by Jensen Huang, David Solomon, Larry Fink, Jonathan Gray, and the heads of Apollo, KKR, and Brookfield, Fink's comparison of financing GPU purchases to the early days of 1970s mortgage-backed securities and the underlying assumption that Nvidia chips won't depreciate, a breakdown of how asset-backed lending structures like aircraft bonds could apply to GPU financing, Tom's "Through the Looking Glass" thesis arguing markets remain captive to Bernanke-era assumptions that no longer hold in a supply-side, fiscal-dominance framework, tomorrow's CPI report and whether a firm print could test Warsh's rate stance, and NFIB Small Business Optimism hitting its highest level since last August with hiring plans at a four-year high even as actual employment remains soft.

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Andrew, Ben, and Tom discuss Berkshire Hathaway finally deploying its cash pile with the $6.8 billion purchase of Taylor Morrison Homes, a $10 billion new stake in Google now among its top five holdings, and $4.5 billion in buybacks, prompting the question of whether Buffett's years of caution are giving way to optimism, operating earnings up 24% and utilities profit up 27% even as BNSF and Geico continue to lag, TSMC's strong July sales supporting Q3 guidance for 46-48% revenue growth, a rough stretch for agriculture with Taylor Farms recalling jalapeño products in a salmonella outbreak following an earlier Cyclospora scare, and Treasury Wine Estates taking a $500 million charge and retreating from its US "masstige" strategy as global wine consumption hits its lowest level since the 1960s

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Andrew, Ben, and Tom discuss Atlassian soaring 30% after declaring "AI is the best thing that's ever happened" to the company with credit consumption doubling quarter-over-quarter, the ECB reportedly blindsided after Treasury sold euros rather than dollars in last week's yen intervention with senior officials calling it an unprecedented breach of monetary cooperation conventions, Microchip Technology rising 9% on accelerating data center demand and a long multi-year upcycle across aerospace, defense, industrial, and automotive, Natera jumping 15% on accelerated MRD testing, Elon Musk's new $16.8 billion Terafab chip facility in Texas backed by SpaceX and Tesla, SK Hynix's $38 billion capacity expansion to ease the memory shortage, reports that Nvidia is testing lower-memory versions of its next-gen Rubin Ultra GPU, upcoming changes to the PCE calculation expected to lower reported inflation by up to 30bps, today's jobs report, and new US intelligence suggesting Putin could test NATO's resolve with a limited incursion.


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Ben and Tom discuss WSJ's Timiraos reporting that Trump has been calling Warsh repeatedly since he became Fed Chair — treating him as a trusted economic adviser on the Iran war and AI's economic impact — reigniting the Fed independence debate just as Bessent posted a viral tweet that lit up financial media, memory names WDC dropping 16% and SNDK falling 12% on decelerating quarterly growth despite still-strong annual revenue, ISM Services showing continued resilience with tariff and Middle East concerns fading and World Cup boosts persisting, Fastenal running slightly better than seasonal, Bank of America showing acceleration in lower-income segments, Costco's lowest ex-gas ticket since November potentially signaling disinflation, and Meta launching its Muse Code coding agent as a cheaper alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic.


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Andrew, Ben, and Tom discuss SpaceX falling 11% despite laying out an ambitious AI and Starlink roadmap including Grok 5 trained on internal SpaceX data by year-end, 1.4GW of current compute growing toward 10GW by end of 2027, deploying NVL72-designed data centers on the ground rather than in space, boots on the moon by 2028, and the goal of scaling launch cadence to one per day in 2027, SpaceX's decision to go exclusively with Nvidia sending AMD down 9% despite good results and CPU acceleration while Arista Networks jumped 14% on accelerating networking demand tied to Nvidia, CVS raising guidance and re-adding Zepbound to its formulary while publicly backing Eli Lilly with expanded GLP-1 support, Lilly beating on stronger-than-expected GLP-1 pricing, Disney rising 4% on parks strength and a TikTok short-form video partnership, Uber slipping despite record first-time user additions, and the JOLTS report showing softer job openings but likely not a signal Warsh will weigh.


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