Cooling inflation, red-hot Korean chips

Core CPI rose 0.2% in July, the softest monthly print in months, pulling annual inflation down to 3.4%. That is still nearly double the Fed's target, but the direction of travel is what markets wanted after a summer of tariff-driven price scares. Traders have pushed up the odds of a September cut, and the dollar softened on the print. The risk is that this reading gets revised or proves temporary once tariff refund effects and base-rate distortions wash through later data.

Ed Yardeni raised his S&P 500 target to 8,400, citing what he calls fabulous earnings momentum running through Q2 reporting season. That is one of the more bullish calls on the Street right now, coming as cooling inflation and tariff refunds both flatter corporate margins simultaneously. The problem for anyone following the call is disentangling how much of that momentum is real demand versus one-off accounting tailwinds. Get that wrong and the target looks a lot less fabulous by Q4.

Apple added $0.11 to diluted EPS and two full percentage points to gross margin from tariff refunds this quarter, while Amazon booked $600 million, according to Bloomberg's reporting on the rollback of Trump-era IEEPA tariffs. US Customs had refunded $71 billion of the $166 billion available by mid-July, with $49.2 billion of that landing in June alone, per Fortune's read of Treasury data. The catch is accounting treatment: some firms book refunds as gross margin, others as inventory adjustments or other income, so two companies reporting identical cash back can show wildly different margin stories. Only 8 of 40 companies that discussed refunds on Q1 calls had actually recognised them as a benefit, which means this earnings tailwind still has room to run through the rest of 2026. Separately, Mexico is pushing Washington to tax only a small slice of a car's value rather than the full price, a structural change that would matter more to automakers than any single refund cheque.

The Kospi has ripped 22% higher in barely two trading weeks as memory chip pricing and AI demand reignite Samsung and SK Hynix. That pace outstrips even the sharpest AI-driven rallies of the past two years, and it is happening while US inflation cools and the Fed edges toward cuts, a combination that typically favours risk assets in export-heavy markets like Korea's. The question now is whether this is a genuine re-rating of Korean chipmakers' AI exposure or a momentum spike that reverses the moment Nvidia's earnings disappoint. Either way, Korean equities have gone from unloved to the best-performing major index in the region almost overnight.

More than 500 wells in UK waters have already missed their decommissioning deadlines, and the North Sea Transition Authority says 940 remain to be shut down, warning operators face fines of up to £1 million per breach. Only 103 wells were fully decommissioned in 2024, against a pace of 300 a year that the NSTA says is needed just to stop the backlog growing, at a total forecast cost of £40 billion in 2021 prices. Meanwhile in Greenland, local authorities have forced a Trump-linked US oil firm to delay its drilling timetable, rejecting the idea that crude could flow as early as next year. Both stories point the same way: legacy oil assets are getting harder to hold and more expensive to exit, whether the constraint is a UK fine or Greenlandic permitting.

Lambda has priced a $917 million leveraged loan, backed by Morgan Stanley, to fund a GPU purchase that Nvidia will then partly rent back under a deal reportedly worth $1.3 to $1.5 billion over four years covering around 18,000 chips. Order books came in near $2 billion against the $917 million ask, and the loan priced at 99 cents on the dollar with a spread of up to 3.75 points over benchmark, according to reporting picked up by The Next Web. Nvidia is simultaneously Lambda's investor, GPU supplier, and now tenant, which is a neat trick until GPU resale values wobble or AI cloud demand cools. This follows CoreWeave's earlier leveraged-loan precedent, meaning debt, not equity, is becoming the default way neoclouds fund the AI buildout.

Google's latest hardware push lands the Pixel Watch 5 and Pixel 11 Pro Fold into a market where foldables and wearables remain a rounding error next to Apple's iPhone volumes. The bigger point is strategic patience: Google keeps iterating on form factors that barely move revenue because they justify Tensor chip investment and keep Android's premium tier from ceding entirely to Samsung and Apple. Nobody is betting the farm on fold sales this cycle.

Wholesale inflation in Japan is holding stubbornly high, complicating the Bank of Japan's case for a slow, gradual path on rates. Producer prices feed through to consumer inflation with a lag, so persistent PPI strength keeps pressure on Governor Ueda to normalise faster than he'd like, even as global central banks including the Fed lean dovish. A BOJ hike into a Fed cut would widen policy divergence and could send the yen sharply the other way after months of weakness.

ASX Ltd shares had their biggest one-day jump in six years after flagging a stronger listings pipeline, with new IPOs up 37% to 92 in 2025 from 67 the year before, and average returns on those listings hitting 24.2%. The upgrade lands weeks before Anthony Attia takes over as chief executive, effectively handing him a tailwind rather than a turnaround job. Origin Energy shares also rose after a profit beat driven by accelerating EV and home battery adoption in Australia. Treasury Wine went the other way, with full-year earnings down 36% as a global alcohol downturn and soft demand in China and the US hit volumes, a reminder that Australian equities are being repriced stock by stock rather than as a single macro trade.

MSCI is removing GoTo Group from its Global Standard indexes effective after the close on 31 August, ending a freeze that began in May when the Indonesian ride-hailing and e-commerce group's shares got stuck at Jakarta's minimum tradeable price of 50 rupiah. Fund managers had complained they simply couldn't trade the stock at that floor, which is a liquidity problem index funds can't engineer around. GoTo was once valued above $32 billion; a separate report links its slide to a government cap on ride-hailing commissions at 8%, which could cut on-demand revenue by more than a third this year. Passive funds tracking MSCI's Indonesia benchmark will now have to sell, removing one of the country's flagship tech names from a major global index entirely.

Brazil's Congress is moving to attach expenditure-control measures to existing legislation, with Finance Minister Fernando Haddad's proposals expected to save around 10 billion reais next year by capping programme growth within the fiscal framework's 0.6% to 2.5% real spending band, according to Reuters. The government also wants to strip certain oil revenue transferred to the Social Fund out of the calculation for mandatory health spending, stopping windfalls from mechanically inflating outlays. This matters because Lula has flip-flopped on fiscal discipline before, freezing then unfreezing spending as elections approached, and investors have punished the real each time restraint looked shaky. A credible cap now, months before Lula's reelection push intensifies, is the clearest test yet of whether Brasília means it this time.

Goldman Sachs is paying up to $2.25 billion for Neos Investments, a specialist in options-based income ETFs managing roughly $30 billion across 19 funds as of June 30. The deal lifts Goldman's active ETF assets to $80 billion and its total ETF platform to around $130 billion, making it the eighth-largest active ETF manager by Morningstar's count. It's Goldman's second big options-ETF purchase in under a year, following the $2 billion Innovator Capital Management deal, and the pattern is unmistakable: Goldman is building a derivatives-driven income franchise rather than competing head-on with Vanguard and BlackRock on plain index trackers. Expect the closing, pencilled in for Q1 2027, to draw only routine regulatory scrutiny given the fragmented nature of the ETF issuer market.

Bob Iger and Thrive Capital's Josh Kushner are buying the Los Angeles Lakers at a $12.5 billion valuation, barely a year after Mark Walter's TWG Global took control of the team from the Buss family at $10 billion, Bloomberg reports. That's a 25% markup in roughly twelve months for one franchise, and it still needs sign-off from the NBA Board of Governors before it's final. Kushner and Iger had reportedly been circling the league's Las Vegas expansion before pivoting to the Lakers instead, which says something about how scarce top-tier NBA ownership stakes have become. Jared Kushner's brother now co-owns one of the most valuable sports properties on the planet.

N Chandrasekaran has told the board he will not pursue reappointment as Tata Sons chairman when his term ends in February 2027, ending a months-long deadlock in which four of six directors backed an extension but Noel Tata reportedly withheld support, per Reuters. Noel Tata had wanted assurances that Tata Sons would never pursue a public listing, a demand that speaks to a much bigger fight over control of India's largest conglomerate than a simple succession timetable. Chandrasekaran will stay until February but has asked the board to start planning a handover now, ahead of the Tata Sons AGM on 18 August. This closes in on a decade of Chandrasekaran running the group and reopens exactly the kind of governance rift that forced Cyrus Mistry out in 2016.

Leavitt is leaving the podium after roughly 18 months as one of the youngest press secretaries in White House history. The exit lands amid a broader reshuffle of Trump's communications operation heading into the second half of his term, and whoever replaces her inherits a press corps that has grown openly combative over tariff policy and immigration enforcement. Her departure adds to a run of senior personnel changes this year that make the administration's messaging operation look less settled than it did in January.

Brent is drifting sideways again this morning with no fresh catalyst, leaving traders parked between soft demand data and OPEC+ discipline. Nobody's forcing a breakout either way today.

Former senior CDC official Debra Houry says federal and state case counts diverge wildly, with Michigan alone reporting 2,640 cases on 13 July against a national CDC figure of just 843 that day. RFK Jr has called the outbreak contained; the CDC's own updates say the investigation is still open, with the recalled-lettuce cluster alone standing at 6,358 illnesses and two deaths.

Home Depot hasn't named an interim successor publicly, leaving investors to parse the retailer's leadership bench just as the housing-linked spending outlook stays fragile. The stock's reaction so far has been muted.

Q2 net profit hit €781 million, well above the €686 million analysts expected, pushing the bank to lift its 2026 commercial NII guidance to €6.8 billion and cut cost guidance to €5.5 billion, now folding in the newly closed NIBC acquisition. Fee income jumped 25% and return on equity climbed to 12.1%, a genuinely strong quarter rather than a rates-driven fluke.