Daily newsletter · Mon 7 Sep 2026
 | SharespectiveWall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletterMon 7 Sep 2026 |
 All That For 0.1% Plus: Aon is borrowing US$17.5 billion to buy an insurance broker, and its own shareholders flinched. |
Good morning, and welcome to Monday. The S&P 500 finished the week at 7,718.60, up 0.09%, and the Nasdaq Composite at 26,506.99, up 0.40%. Nothing about the five days that produced those numbers was calm. Fresh American strikes on Iran sent crude higher on Monday, the US 10-year Treasury yield touched 4.80% early in the week, Fed governor Christopher Waller talked everyone down from a rate rise on Thursday, and Friday's jobs report put them straight back up again. Net movement on the S&P: seven points.
So the market opens tonight roughly where it left off, except that a September rate rise now looks more likely than not. Futures put the odds of a hike at the 15–16 September meeting near 60%, and the two numbers most likely to settle it — August producer prices and consumer prices — arrive Thursday and Friday. The European Central Bank votes in between. For a week that went nowhere, that leaves a lot of ways to be surprised.
Market snapshot
| S&P 5007,718.60▲ 0.09% | | NASDAQ26,506.99▲ 0.40% | | NZX 5013,974.18▲ 1.50% |
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| ASX 2009,006.00▼ 0.95% | | USD/NZD1.7004▲ 0.44% | | USD/AUD1.3883▼ 0.59% |
Levels are Friday's closes and changes are for the week to Friday 4 September. US levels are the official 4pm New York close; the NZX 50 and ASX 200 are Friday's local closes, and currencies were taken at the end of Friday's New York session.
| MARKETS |
The index went nowhere last week and the cruise ships went to new lows
Underneath that flat week, one corner of the American market fell out of bed. Carnival, Wynn Resorts, Las Vegas Sands and VICI Properties all touched 52-week lows in the first two sessions. Carnival closed Friday at US$23.52 against a February high of US$34.03 — roughly a third of the company gone in seven months, in a year when the index it belongs to is up.
Why leisure gets squeezed at both ends. Cruise lines and casinos are unusually exposed to two things that both moved the wrong way last week. The first is fuel: Carnival does not fully hedge its bunker costs, so a crude price that finished the week near US$91 a barrel, up about 9% in five days, runs straight into the cost line. The second is borrowing, because these are debt-heavy businesses whose profits sit years out, and a 10-year yield near 4.80% makes both facts dearer. Then there is the customer, who also buys petrol.
The summary of 2026 so far is that energy is the best-performing sector in the S&P 500 and consumer discretionary is the worst. Those are the same trade seen from either end, and the index owns both, which is how it absorbs a week like that and still finishes up seven points.
Next up Friday's consumer price index is the first proper read on whether the oil move has reached the shelves. If it has, this stops being a cruise line story. |
| DEALMAKING |
Aon is borrowing US$17.5 billion to buy an insurance broker and its shareholders sent the bill back
On Monday last week, Aon agreed to pay US$17 billion in cash for USI Insurance Services, buying it from KKR and a group of co-owners. Aon shares fell 6.4% the same day, knocking about US$5 billion off a company worth roughly US$75 billion beforehand. Shareholders are not usually that blunt on day one.
What Aon is actually buying. USI is the tenth-largest insurance broker in the United States: about US$3 billion of annual revenue, 10,500 staff and close to 200 offices, selling property cover, employee benefits and retirement advice to mid-sized companies. Brokers sit between the business buying cover and the insurer writing it, and take a cut of the premium. Aon paid US$13 billion for NFP in 2024 to get into that same middle market, so this is the previous bet again, only larger. For KKR, which took USI private in 2017 for US$4.3 billion alongside a Canadian pension fund, it was a very good Monday.
The objection is how it is being paid for. Aon is issuing US$17.5 billion of new debt, lifting borrowings from about 2.8 times earnings to 4.8. Buybacks stop, with US$7.7 billion of authorisation sitting unused. S&P Global moved its outlook to negative and Moody's shifted its to stable from positive. Aon expects the deal to reduce adjusted earnings per share in 2027 and add to them from 2028.
A word of caution the promised savings are a forecast, while the interest bill is a contract. Two years is a long stretch to be paying one and waiting on the other. |
| LISTINGS |
Shein finally got listed, at about a quarter of what it was worth in 2022
The fast-fashion company started trading in Hong Kong on Tuesday under the code 00625, selling roughly 280 million shares at HK$48.56 each. That raised HK$13.6 billion, or about US$1.74 billion, the largest new share issue on the exchange this year. The stock dropped below HK$44 within minutes of opening, then spent the day clawing its way back to close at HK$48.50 — six Hong Kong cents under the offer price. Not a disaster, and nobody's idea of a good debut either.
Three cities and three years to get here. Shein filed confidentially for a New York listing in 2023 and got nowhere, then turned to London, where Beijing withheld approval over the risk disclosures attached to its Chinese supply chain and effectively killed it. Hong Kong was what was left. The listing puts the company at roughly US$26.5 billion, against the US$100 billion private investors paid up for in 2022.
The gap is not all about the venue. Shein lost US$99 million in the first quarter of this year, against a profit of US$395 million a year earlier, with tariffs and freight eating the margin. Its answer has been to put prices up, which is awkward for a business whose whole proposition was that everything was cheap.
Food for thought the share price is really asking whether Shein was ever a great retailer or mostly a very good user of trade rules that have since changed. The next few quarters of margin will answer that better than any prospectus. |
Newsworthy numbers
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| US$5.85 the American average price of a gallon of diesel on Friday, a record, edging past the US$5.82 set in June 2022. Adjusted for inflation the old peak was higher, which will console nobody who drives a truck. | | 1.17% the S&P 500's average September fall since 1928, the only month of the twelve with a negative long-run average. It still finishes higher in 44% of Septembers, so this is a mood rather than a rule. |
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| 17,687 Australian dwelling approvals in July, down 3.6% on June but 6.0% ahead of a year earlier. | | 8 letters the size of the genetic alphabet a cellular enzyme can read accurately, according to UC San Diego researchers. Double the four that every living thing has made do with so far. |
Worth a read
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| 01 | More banks hike interest rates after the OCR increase — Who moved and by how much. The bit worth noticing is that mortgage rates rose faster than deposit rates, and the Reserve Bank has said out loud it does not like the gap. |
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| 02 | Australian auction clearance rates fall below 50% as spring stock rises — The spring selling season opened at a 49.5% clearance rate against 69.3% a year ago, with about 1,485 homes under the hammer instead of 2,122. Brisbane cleared 27.4%. |
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| 03 | Why Ravensburger is the gold standard of jigsaw puzzles — A 143-year-old German firm hand-draws every piece shape, has custom steel blades made for each design, then cuts them with 1,000 tonnes of force. About a quarter of the world market. |
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| 04 | 80,000-year-old arrowheads rewrite human history — Stone points under two centimetres wide, found in a rock shelter in Uzbekistan, with impact damage suggesting a bow rather than a spear. Near-identical points turn up in France 25,000 years later. |
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| 05 | The 17 minutes that changed America — Garrett Graff on the short window before 11 September 2001 became what it became, including the FBI director in his first week on the job staring at a clear blue sky. Friday is the 25th anniversary. |
Wrapping up
Last week was a round trip: an oil shock and a bond sell-off early, a relief rally when Waller suggested the Fed could wait, then a hot jobs report that undid the argument. This week fills in the gaps. The European Central Bank decides on Thursday at 2.15pm in Frankfurt — 10.15pm in Sydney, 12.15am Friday in Auckland — and is fully expected to lift its deposit rate a quarter-point to 2.50%. US producer prices land the same day, and August consumer prices follow on Friday, with economists looking for 0.4% on the month, 3.4% over the year and core at 2.4%.
The earnings diary is short and top-heavy. Oracle and Adobe both report after Thursday's close: for Oracle, guiding to 27–29% revenue growth, watch how much of the AI backlog is converting into billed revenue and what it is spending to get there; for Adobe, consensus sits near US$5.83 a share on US$6.46 billion of revenue. Inditex reports Wednesday, Kroger on Friday. Closer to home, Australia gets Westpac consumer confidence and NAB business confidence on Tuesday alongside RBA speeches from Sarah Hunter and Andrew Hauser, China's trade figures land Tuesday and its inflation reading Wednesday, and the BusinessNZ manufacturing index closes the week.
The kiwi had the odder week, slipping about 0.5% to US$0.5881 in the same week the Reserve Bank raised the Official Cash Rate, while the Australian dollar rose 0.6% to US$0.7203 and lifted the cross to roughly NZ$1.22. That gap is about what each central bank does next rather than what it just did: the RBNZ signalled a gentler path from here, while stronger Australian growth has markets pricing a fair chance of an RBA move this month.
Have a good week — back tomorrow.
General information and commentary only, and 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 talk to a licensed financial adviser before making any investment decision.