Daily newsletter · Tue 25 Aug 2026
 | SharespectiveWall street, before your first coffee | Tue 25 Aug 2026 Issue 234 |
 Too Ambitious Plus: Trump put a 50% tariff on Canadian cars and trucks, and Ottawa is already loading its answer. |
Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday. The person with the most to gain from AI enthusiasm spent Monday talking it down. In an interview with podcaster David Senra that aired during the session, Sam Altman said the whole industry, OpenAI included, had been too ambitious about how quickly AI would change anything. The market took him at his word and sold the companies that make the parts.
It hit the least glamorous end of the trade hardest — memory chips, the stuff that stores the data rather than does the thinking. The Dow finished up anyway, because Visa and JPMorgan do not care what Sam Altman thinks.
Market snapshot
| S&P 5007,652.86▼ 0.28% | | NASDAQ25,980.19▼ 0.76% | | NZX 5013,881.88▼ 0.65% |
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| ASX 2009,103.10▲ 0.49% | | USD/NZD1.6781▲ 0.35% | | USD/AUD1.3986▲ 0.31% |
US levels are the official 4pm New York close on Monday 24 August. The NZX 50 and ASX 200 are Monday's local closes, and currencies were taken late in Monday's New York session.
| BIG TECH |
Sam Altman said the industry got AI's timeline wrong, and the memory chips paid for it
Altman's line was that he had misjudged the speed, not the destination: the economy has enormous inertia, and after GPT-4 shipped in 2023 he expected far more disruption, far sooner, than arrived. We have all been too ambitious on timelines, he said. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 2.7% to 11,423.17 with every one of its 30 members lower, and the worst landed on storage — Seagate down 6.51%, SanDisk 6.45%, Micron 5.83% and Western Digital 5.24%. Nvidia fell 2.3%, AMD and Broadcom more than 3% and 2%.
Why memory always cops it first. Making memory chips means committing to enormous factories years before anyone knows what demand will be, and the product is close enough to a commodity that the price moves on how much exists versus how much is wanted. So when a growth forecast moves, memory reprices straight away, while a company selling a differentiated chip has room to argue. Hence 6% off Seagate and 2% off Nvidia, from a podcast.
The timing was awkward. Nvidia reports Wednesday after the New York close, having guided to roughly US$91 billion of revenue give or take 2%, with analysts at about US$91.8 billion — almost double the same quarter a year ago — and around US$85 billion of that from data centres. Those numbers assume the buildout keeps going at its current pace.
The tell not the revenue line on Wednesday, which is largely already known, but the guide for the October quarter. Altman has told everyone the customers are slower than expected. Nvidia's forecast is the first real chance to see whether the people writing the cheques agree. |
| TRADE |
Trump put a 50% tariff on Canadian cars and trucks, and Ottawa is not waiting to answer
The President said on Monday that tariffs on all cars, trucks, automotive parts and steel from Canada will go to 50% on 1 January 2027, citing a US$60 billion trade deficit and accusing Canada of ripping the United States off. Ford fell about 4% to US$13.87 and Stellantis about 4%, while General Motors got off lighter at roughly 2%. The clearest read was in trucking: J.B. Hunt dropped 5.3%, because a freight company's earnings depend on things crossing borders.
How the talks fell over. Negotiations collapsed last week over the classification of heavy-duty trucks. Canada wanted super-duty pickups — the Ford F-350 sort of vehicle — inside the category getting tariff relief, and the American side pulled them out at the last minute. That left GM trucks built at Oshawa and Ford pickups about to start at Oakville facing the full rate while other vehicles did not. When talks broke off, 50% tariffs on about US$20 billion of Canadian goods took effect immediately.
Canada has already set its response. Dollar-for-dollar counter-tariffs on roughly US$20 billion of American goods start on 8 September, covering electronics, machinery, dairy, paper goods, appliances and farm equipment. Ontario's premier has gone further, raising the possibility of restricting electricity exports and critical minerals — a considerably sharper instrument than a levy on cheese.
The catch the auto tariff does not start for more than four months, while Canada's retaliation starts in two weeks. A January date is a negotiating deadline dressed up as a policy. The 8 September date is not. |
| ENERGY |
Washington announced its harshest Iran sanctions yet, and the oil price went down
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiled a programme he is calling Operation Economic Outcast, targeting more than 60 individuals, entities and vessels and warning governments, banks and companies that dealing with Tehran could cost them access to the US dollar system. Asked whether that could reach Chinese banks, he said no one is above the reach of US sanctions. Crude then fell: West Texas Intermediate settled down about 2.4% near US$85 a barrel, Brent about the same near US$92.
Why the oil market shrugged. Sanctions change who may buy Iranian barrels, not how many barrels exist. Six months of war and an American blockade have already taken most of Iran's exports out of the market, so tightening the rules on flows that have largely stopped adds little new lost supply. Traders had also spent the previous week bidding crude up in anticipation, and Monday was partly the sound of them banking it.
The version that matters down here showed up in Monday's New Zealand data. Stats NZ reported retail sales volumes fell 0.5% in the June quarter, the first quarterly fall since September 2024, and fuel volumes dropped 13% — the largest fall of the 15 industries measured. Higher pump prices, courtesy of the Middle East, pushed the dollars spent on fuel up and the litres bought down, and the money came out of everything else.
The open question whether the dollar-system threat ever gets tested on a large Chinese bank. Until then it is a warning. The day it is enforced it becomes a fact about the global payments system, and oil will not be the only thing repricing. |
Newsworthy numbers
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| $67.72 BHP's record intraday high on Monday, up from Friday's $65.16, on a copper rally. Last week's full-year result was the first time copper out-earned iron ore. | | US$40 trillion roughly where America's national debt is heading, and the backdrop to every argument about long-dated Treasuries this year. |
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| Seven buffets left on the Las Vegas Strip, down from more than 35. Some casinos run them at a loss of US$1.5m to US$2m a month to get people through the door, which is an expensive way to sell prawns. | | 15 million users of Yope, a London invite-only photo app with no algorithm, no ads and no public posts, signed up since 2024 on no marketing spend. |
Worth a read
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| 01 | The average Kiwi retires with $78k in KiwiSaver. For many women, it's far less — Balances at 65 are up more than $8,000 on a year ago. The gender gap starts at 21% in your early twenties and reaches 35% by retirement. |
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| 02 | Can you access your super savings early? — The narrow set of circumstances in which Australians can get at their super early, and what it costs them later. |
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| 03 | Mortgage stress risk in Australia — Roy Morgan puts 29% of mortgage holders at risk, with the "extremely at risk" group well above its twenty-year average. |
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| 04 | From toilets, textiles, and MSG to AI semiconductor chips — Three century-old Japanese manufacturers that quietly became essential to chipmaking. The MSG company now dominates a material inside almost every advanced processor. |
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| 05 | Even babies are living in an AI-powered surveillance state — The baby monitor is now a machine-learning product with a subscription, and nervous new parents turn out to be a very good market. |
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| 06 | Lies, theft, and cover-up: the history of Monopoly you've never heard — The board game about ruthless property accumulation was invented to warn people off it, and then somebody else took the credit. |
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| 07 | JWST finds early galaxies may be four times more massive than thought — The first galaxies appear to be full of small faint stars nobody counted, which multiplies their mass estimates several times over. |
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| 08 | Too much or too little sleep may make your body age faster — Biological ageing was lowest in people sleeping between about 6.4 and 7.8 hours, and the curve turns up at both ends. |
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| 09 | Pluto was reclassified 20 years ago. Here's why everyone still loves it — Two decades on, the demotion still irritates plenty of planetary scientists, including the one who ran the mission that flew past it. |
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| 10 | The banker who found freedom in a Dodge van, and other extraordinary lives we've lost — Short reader-written obituaries of ordinary people. Better than most things you will read this week. |
Wrapping up
The week's two set pieces are both American. July PCE, the inflation measure the Fed targets, lands Wednesday at 8.30am New York time — 12.30am Thursday in Auckland, 10.30pm Wednesday in Sydney — with the core rate expected up about 0.3% on the month, leaving the annual figure near June's 3.3%. Then on Friday, Kevin Warsh gives his first Jackson Hole keynote as Fed chair at roughly 10am New York time, which is 2am Saturday here and midnight in Australia.
Nvidia reports Wednesday after the close, about 9am Thursday here, and the line to watch is the October-quarter guide rather than the quarter just gone. Marvell follows Thursday. Closer to home, Australia's July CPI indicator is out Wednesday at 11.30am AEST, with the RBA on hold at 4.35% and its next decision at the end of September. New Zealand's diary is empty after Monday's retail trade until ANZ's business survey on 31 August, with the OCR at 2.25%.
The kiwi eased to about 0.5959 US, or 1.6781 on the USD/NZD quote, and the Australian dollar slipped to roughly 0.7150, or 1.3986 on USD/AUD, though both remain close to three-month highs. That was risk appetite rather than rates — a soft session for American technology pulled money back towards the US dollar, and neither central bank meets this week.
Enjoy your Tuesday, and we'll see you in the morning.
General information and commentary only. This is not financial advice and 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 financial adviser before investing.