Fed says more hikes won't break America

Julia Wang, Nomura's North Asia chief investment officer, argues the US economy can absorb further tightening without tipping into recession, and the Fed's own numbers back her up. The September meeting delivered a unanimous 12-0 vote to lift rates to 3.75-4.00%, the first hike since July 2023, and the Fed's projections actually raised 2026 growth to 2.3% while cutting the unemployment forecast to 4.1%, according to the Fed's own summary of projections. That is an unusual combination: a central bank tightening into stronger growth expectations, not weaker ones. Governor Christopher Waller pointed to real private domestic final purchases running at a 3% annualised pace in the first half of the year as evidence demand has not cracked. The catch is timing. Median projections show rates holding near 4.1% through 2027 with no cuts, so the AI capex and consumer spending propping up growth now will eventually meet financing costs that arrived a year late.

Iran offered a seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for lifting the US naval blockade, waiving oil sanctions and resuming nuclear talks, and Trump turned it down flat, calling Tehran's position a sign it was losing so badly, according to Reuters. Government bonds had briefly rallied on hopes of a deal. They resumed their slide the moment it collapsed, while oil rose and Asian equities fell. That reaction shows how markets are actually pricing this conflict: not as a geopolitical risk that demands safe-haven buying, but as an inflation shock that demands higher rates. Qatar may still broker indirect talks as soon as today, but until tankers are moving again, every extra day of impasse adds to the same energy-driven inflation case the Fed used to justify its September hike.

US Ambassador David Perdue told CNBC and Fox News that Washington's Taiwan policy is unchanged after Xi Jinping's White House visit, reaffirming the One-China policy, the Taiwan Relations Act, three joint communiques and the Six Assurances, as Bloomberg reported. Xi had pushed Trump to handle the Taiwan question carefully during the talks, and Beijing wanted Washington to go further, explicitly opposing Taiwan independence rather than simply opposing coercion. It did not get it. Taiwan's Deputy Foreign Minister Chen said Taipei received repeated assurances through multiple channels that nothing shifted. For chip supply chains and anyone pricing cross-Strait risk, the absence of change is the actual news: no concession bought with trade or AI cooperation, no new arms package announced either.

HSBC has approval to open branches in cities like Surat, Nagpur, Lucknow and Patna, the largest foreign-bank expansion in India in over a decade, but the target customer is narrow: 200 to 250 wealthy families per city, chasing a private-banking segment that starts at $2 million in investable assets, according to Moneycontrol. Group CEO Georges Elhedery confirmed this month that India remains a priority for fresh investment, with wealth management top of the list. HSBC is betting that 93% of India's new urban wealth over the next 15 years will come from outside its five biggest cities, and it would rather own that relationship early than fight HDFC and ICICI for mass-market deposits later. Reports that HSBC may also re-enter Indian equity broking after a 13-year absence remain unconfirmed, but they fit the same logic: go where the fee income is, not where the footfall is.

Chancellor John Healey will use his Liverpool conference speech to confirm a UK-only competition for three floating docks at HM Naval Base Clyde, part of a reported 6 billion pound Royal Navy package sitting inside a wider 15 billion pound shipyard upgrade, according to government announcements. The docks, under Programme Euston, support the UK's nuclear-submarine fleet and are due in service in the early 2030s. Restricting the tender to British firms is a deliberate sovereignty call, since it removes cheaper overseas bidders from a project tied directly to the nuclear deterrent. Healey resigned as defence secretary over funding disputes before returning as chancellor, which gives this announcement a personal edge the government is happy to lean into. What is missing from the plan is a jobs number, a bidder list or a procurement timetable, meaning the new age of industrialisation line is currently doing more work than the paperwork behind it.

Spot gold sits at roughly $4,265 an ounce, down more than 2% on the week, which is the opposite of what an unresolved Strait of Hormuz standoff would normally produce, as Bloomberg noted. The mechanism is straightforward: higher oil prices are pushing inflation expectations up, and traders now price a 71% chance of an October Fed hike and 95% for December, according to the CME FedWatch data cited by Asharq Al-Awsat. Gold pays no interest, so when real yields rise, it gets punished even while geopolitical risk should theoretically support it. That tension between inflation hedge and rate-driven opportunity cost is currently being won by rates. A dollar that keeps strengthening on the same hawkish logic only compounds the pressure on bullion from here.

The Malaysian ringgit has gained roughly 12% over the past year, more than any other Asian currency, and Bloomberg's own analysis found only about a quarter of that gain is explained by dollar weakness, according to The Star. The rest comes from data-centre foreign direct investment, semiconductor exports and Malaysia's spot as one of the IMF's four largest net exporters of AI-related hardware alongside South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. It also helps that Malaysia is a net oil and gas exporter, so the same Hormuz-driven crude spike hurting gold is actively flattering the ringgit's trade balance. HSBC has raised its year-end forecast to 3.85 per dollar, and foreign funds poured a record $3.9 billion into Malaysian bonds in August alone. The risk sitting underneath all of this is concentration: a serious correction in global chip valuations would hit the currency and the data-centre pipeline at the same time.

Satsuki Katayama said rising Japanese government bond yields partly reflect global capital demand tied to AI infrastructure, then added the line that matters: the boom will not last forever, as Reuters reported. The 10-year JGB hit 3% on September 1 for the first time since 1996, and that threshold matters well beyond Tokyo because Japanese institutions have parked enormous sums abroad for decades chasing yield they could not get at home. If domestic bonds now pay 3%, that money has a reason to come back, and Reuters flagged the risk this could reverse a long-standing flow that has helped fund US Treasuries. Katayama is essentially betting the AI capex cycle cools before Japanese capital repatriation forces a bigger global rates reset. If she is wrong on timing, borrowing costs rise everywhere at once, not just in Tokyo.

The Indonesia Stock Exchange lowered its minimum tradable share price from 50 rupiah to 1 rupiah today, roughly $0.00005, in a bid to unstick 111 stocks that had been frozen at the old floor with no genuine buyers or sellers, according to IntelliNews. The mechanism is simple: a fixed floor prevents genuinely worthless stock from trading down to its real price, so it just stops trading altogether. IDX chief executive Jeffrey Hendrik framed this as a liquidity fix, but the timing lines up with reporting that MSCI had threatened to demote Jakarta from emerging-market to frontier-market status. A one-rupiah increment on a one-rupiah stock is a 100% price move, so the exchange has traded one distortion for another. Whether that counts as progress depends entirely on whether real volume shows up in the newly unfrozen names, not just a lower quoted number.

Oura's revenue hit $1.21 billion for the nine months to June 30, up 74%, but its net loss attributable to stockholders came in at $924.3 million, more than five times the prior year's $182.8 million, according to Reuters. Strip out the accounting noise around preferred shares and the company actually reported $60.8 million of net income and about $106.7 million of adjusted EBITDA, so the headline loss is a capital-structure artefact rather than a cash-burning business. The real weakness is mix: subscriptions carry an 89% gross margin but are only 20% of revenue, with hardware, at a 46% blended margin, still doing most of the work. Peloton, for comparison, gets 68% of its revenue from subscriptions. At roughly 13 times annualised revenue for a company whose recurring base is this small, Oura is pricing itself as a software company while still selling rings.

Prada CEO Andrea Guerra is rolling out private client apartments in the world's top 25 capitals, complete with destination experiences and six-figure garments, an attempt to close the gap with Hermes and Chanel at the very top of the luxury pyramid, as reported by Fashion Network. The logic tracks industry estimates that the richest 0.1% of shoppers account for close to a quarter of all global luxury spending, a segment that barely noticed the sector's contraction from roughly 435 billion euros in 2023 to 422 billion in 2025. Prada's first-half 2026 group revenue grew 16% at constant currency, largely carried by Miu Miu, while the core Prada brand grew just 2.6% and Middle East sales fell 29% amid regional disruption. Adviser David Watts has warned even wealthy clients are getting tired of price rises that outpace perceived value. Snorkeling trips are cheap insurance against that complaint if they keep the ultra-rich buying; they do nothing for the aspirational shopper Prada still needs to keep the brand relevant below the top 0.1%.

Ingenia Communities has received a fresh proposal of A$5.25 a share from Warburg Pincus, up from A$5.05 and A$4.75 in the space of a month, valuing the Australian retirement and holiday-park operator at roughly A$2.1 billion, according to the ASX announcement. Ingenia's independent directors rejected both earlier offers as undervaluing the business, partly because Warburg attached conditions to Ingenia's pending acquisition of developer Peet Limited. Each rejection has been followed within days by a higher number, which shows how much Warburg wants exposure to Ingenia's land-lease and holiday-park cash flows. The board has now agreed merely to assess the new price, not endorse it, leaving the Peet condition as the likely sticking point in any further negotiation.

Senate Republicans have a narrowing window to use the Congressional Review Act to strip California of the EPA waivers underpinning its vehicle-emissions standards, and the Wall Street Journal's opinion pages argue they are about to blow it, in this piece. The stakes go well beyond cars: California's SB 253 and SB 261 climate-disclosure laws already bind any company doing business in the state with revenue above $1 billion or $500 million respectively, effectively setting a national reporting standard since firms rarely run separate compliance regimes per state. The first Scope 1 and Scope 2 disclosures are now due November 10 after the California Air Resources Board granted a three-month extension. A Ninth Circuit panel blocked SB 261 on First Amendment grounds in November 2025 but let SB 253 proceed, so the legal fight is unresolved even as the political one stalls. With the SEC having abandoned its own climate-disclosure rule in court, California's framework is currently the only one with real teeth.

South Korea says Zelenskiy's UN announcement of two captured North Korean soldiers broke a confidentiality deal reached after dozens of quiet consultations, and Kyiv's subsequent denial that any such deal existed has made things worse, not better.

George Bamford becomes joint chairman alongside his father Anthony from October, the first shift at the top since 1975, arriving just as JCB's 2025 pre-tax profit fell to 642 million pounds from 687 million on a 5.2% drop in machine sales.

That's roughly a 5% deposit on a 340,000 pound home, and a Lifetime ISA maxed out every year at 4,000 pounds with its 25% government top-up still takes over four years to get there before interest.

Food and drink now fills 35.8% of occupied units, up from a retail-dominated centre, after the council put 150 million pounds behind a masterplan including a 40 million pound indoor market funded jointly with the UK Levelling Up Fund.