Daily newsletter · Mon 24 Aug 2026
 | SharespectiveWall street, before your first coffee | Mon 24 Aug 2026 Issue 233 |
 The Footnote Problem Plus: Tesla won a permit for 5,000 driverless taxis and had its best week since May. |
Good morning. It's Monday, and this week has a lot in it. Last week did not go well — the S&P 500 fell 1.43% and the Nasdaq Composite 2.05%, ending a three-week winning streak. The trigger was an accounting exercise. The Wall Street Journal added up the footnotes in nine big technology companies' filings and found roughly US$3 trillion of spending commitments that appear nowhere on a balance sheet, and investors spent the next three days selling the companies that would have to build it all.
Whether that mood carries into this week is about to be settled by the diary. Nvidia reports on Wednesday, July's inflation numbers land the same morning, and on Friday a Fed chair almost nobody has heard give a long speech gives his first one at Jackson Hole — three weeks out from a meeting where futures put the chance of a rate rise at about one in three.
Market snapshot
| S&P 5007,674.37▼ 1.43% | | NASDAQ26,180.45▼ 2.05% | | NZX 5013,973.00▲ 0.86% |
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| ASX 2009,058.90▼ 0.62% | | USD/NZD1.6731▼ 1.47% | | USD/AUD1.3949▼ 1.20% |
Levels are Friday's closes and changes are for the week to Friday 21 August. US levels are the official 4pm New York close; the NZX 50 and ASX 200 are Friday's local closes, and currencies were taken late in Friday's New York session.
| MARKETS |
Somebody added up the footnotes, and the money left the AI buildout in a hurry
The Wall Street Journal went through the latest filings of nine companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, Broadcom, SpaceX, AMD and Meta — and totted up what they have promised to spend but not yet spent. The answer was about US$3 trillion, roughly five times the US$600 billion of capital spending those same companies actually reported over the past year. It ran on Tuesday, and the market did not enjoy it.
Why a footnote moves a share price. About US$1.2 trillion of it is uncommenced leases — data centre space a company has signed for but not moved into, which accounting rules keep off the balance sheet until the keys change hands. That is roughly four times what the same companies disclosed a year earlier. The rest is long-term purchase commitments for chips, construction and electricity. None of it counts as debt. All of it is money that has to be found.
Investors treated it as leverage and sold the suppliers. On Tuesday alone GE Vernova fell 6%, FTAI Aviation 7% and Caterpillar 4%, while CoreWeave, which borrows to build data centres, dropped 12.1%. Over the five sessions industrials were the worst sector in the S&P 500, down 4.23%, and utilities next at 3.65%. Healthcare was the best, up 4.19%, with energy adding 2.39% — a lot of money moving from the companies building the future to the companies selling drugs and oil.
What to watch Nvidia's result on Wednesday now does double duty. Nobody doubts the demand — the question after last week is how much of it is funded and how much is merely promised. |
| AUTOS |
Tesla got permission to run 5,000 driverless taxis in Nevada, and had its best week since May
While the rest of the market argued about data centres, Tesla put on about 5%, its strongest week since early May. Nevada regulators cleared a robotaxi fleet of up to 5,000 vehicles, and The Information reported an August debut for the Cybercab, the two-seater built with no steering wheel and no pedals. Elon Musk told the second-quarter call that Cybercab production has started.
Why the permit matters more than the car. Building a vehicle that drives itself is an engineering problem Tesla has worked on publicly for a decade. Being allowed to charge strangers for rides in it is a licensing problem, settled state by state, and that has been the real bottleneck. Five thousand vehicles is not a pilot — it is a fleet, in a city of wide grid streets, short trips and tourists with no attachment to who is driving.
The caution is that Tesla has announced robotaxis before, and public access is expected "as soon as" late August or early September, phrasing that has slipped in the past. Some of last week's move had nothing to do with cars, either: Tesla holds a large pile of bitcoin, and bitcoin had a very good week.
The open question whether a vehicle with no steering wheel scales, or whether Las Vegas is the one city in America where it works. The answer arrives in weeks rather than years, which is new. |
| CONSUMER |
Guzman y Gomez gave up on America and had its best year yet
The Mexican fast-food chain reported its full-year result on Friday, and it was the best in its 20 years. Network sales rose 17.9% to A$1.378 billion, comparable sales — the ones from restaurants open at least a year, which strip out the flattery of new openings — rose 5.3%, and statutory net profit rose 31.6% to A$40.6 million. The shares jumped as much as 13% to A$27.00 before settling up 6.93% at A$25.63, on a day the ASX 200 fell.
The American detour. GYG spent years trying to make its US business work and shut it in May, booking a A$26.7 million loss on discontinued operations. What is left is 284 restaurants and an Australian business that is now the entire growth story, with another 35 openings planned for FY27 and 117 sites in the pipeline.
The balance sheet did the rest of the talking: A$171 million of cash, no debt, a 48.0 cent fully franked dividend, and another A$100 million buyback on top of the A$100 million already done.
The short version the expensive lesson was learned in America and paid for in one line of the accounts, and the business underneath was in better shape than the share price suggested. Retreating is not usually the part of a growth story that gets applause. |
Newsworthy numbers
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| 12% Spark's rise on the NZX last week, its best since August 2015, after an annual result that landed about where analysts had it. The shares closed Friday at $2.17. | | A$817.6 million Australian superannuation released early on compassionate medical grounds for dental treatment in 2024-25, comfortably the largest category. Teeth. |
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| 65 million pounds the mozzarella Chili's gets through in a year, up from 12 million in 2022. Nearly all of it goes into one appetiser. | | 98.80 the US dollar index at Friday's close, down about 1% on the week. It lost ground against every currency in the basket in a week when American long-term interest rates went up, which is not how that is meant to work. |
Worth a read
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| 01 | Jackson Hole hype outruns Warsh's playbook of saying as little as possible — A corrective before Friday: the new chair has spent four months saying as little as he can, and the louder signal is how many colleagues keep dissenting in favour of hikes. |
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| 02 | Term deposit rates will rise — but is that where your money should be? — Two-year rates are up to 4.17% from 3.5% in October and five-year money is at 4.66%. ASB's Chris Tennent-Brown argues the short end is still losing to inflation. |
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| 03 | Can you access your super savings early? — Only 1,200 of 12,500 hardship applications were approved in 2024-25, and a 30-year-old taking out A$20,000 ends up about A$93,600 short at retirement. |
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| 04 | Love and money get tangled up fast when you become a grandparent — Lynda Moore on the grandparents quietly wrecking their own retirement one present at a time, and the conversation that prevents it. |
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| 05 | How Chili's brought back the heat by reviving '90s abundance — Cut about 50 menu items, made the portions bigger, and same-store sales rose 50% in three years. |
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| 06 | Even babies are living in an AI-powered surveillance state — A US$474 cot camera promising parents "36 days worth of snoozing" back a year. The baby monitor market is US$316 million; the wearables market it wants into is nearer US$100 billion. |
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| 07 | Astronomers find a rare "mega-Earth" — Gliese 523b is a rocky planet far heavier than anything in our own system, which is awkward for the models of how planets form. |
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| 08 | An anthropologist wants to fold Australopithecus into the genus Homo — A proposal to redraw the human family tree so several famous fossils, Lucy among them, get reclassified as us. |
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| 09 | World War II's largest prison break happened in rural New South Wales — More than 900 Japanese prisoners rushed the wire at Cowra in 1944. The last survivor died in 2023, aged 103. |
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| 10 | A box of 300 love letters turned up out of the blue — Someone left them at a USO office in 2022 and walked away. Researchers have now found relatives who remember the man who wrote them. |
Wrapping up
Last week was a five-session argument about what the AI buildout actually costs, patched over by a friendly Friday. This week the calendar takes the wheel. Wednesday 26 August is the crowded one: July core PCE, the second estimate of second-quarter GDP and July durable goods all at 8.30am New York time — 12.30am Thursday in Auckland, 10.30pm Wednesday in Sydney — with consensus on core PCE at 3.3% for the year. Jackson Hole runs Thursday to Saturday, and Kevin Warsh's first keynote as chair is expected around 10am New York time on Friday 28 August, which is 2am Saturday in Auckland and midnight in Sydney.
Nvidia reports Wednesday after the US close, Thursday morning here. Analysts have about US$91.9 billion of revenue and US$2.08 a share, data centre revenue is the only line anyone will read, and options are pricing a move of roughly 6% either way. Salesforce and CrowdStrike follow the same day, Marvell on Thursday. Australia is into the busiest week of reporting season — Coles Tuesday, Woolworths Wednesday, Wesfarmers and Qantas Thursday — with RBA minutes Tuesday and the ABS July CPI indicator Wednesday at 11.30am AEST. New Zealand is quiet until the ANZ Business Outlook on Monday 31 August.
Both currencies had a strong week, USD/NZD falling 1.47% to 1.6731 and USD/AUD 1.20% to 1.3949. That was mostly a US dollar losing ground on every front, helped by traders pricing a better chance the Reserve Bank of New Zealand is not finished putting rates up.
Have a good week. Back tomorrow with tonight's session.
General information and commentary only, not financial advice. It does not take account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. It reflects the author's own reading of public information at the time of writing and may be wrong. Do your own research and speak to a licensed adviser before making any investment decision.