Daily newsletter · Tue 15 Sep 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Tue 15 Sep 2026 |
 The Slowdown Trade Plus: a drone strike in Iraq shut Saudi Arabia's back door out of the Gulf. |
Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday. The people who build frontier AI models spent the weekend asking each other to build them more slowly. Dario Amodei of Anthropic wrote the essay, Sam Altman and Elon Musk said he was right, and by Monday morning in New York the market had turned all of that into a trade. Chipmakers got sold. The companies that sell burglar alarms for computers got bought.
Oil did the rest of the damage. Crude climbed again after Saudi Arabia shut the pipeline it has been using to avoid the Strait of Hormuz, and the US 10-year Treasury yield touched 5% for the first time since 2023 before easing back. The Federal Reserve decides on Wednesday. Nobody at that table is short of things to worry about.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,619.96 ▼ 0.48% | | NASDAQ 26,186.41 ▼ 0.56% | | NZX 50 13,560.69 ▼ 0.14% |
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ASX 200 8,749.90 ▲ 0.10% | | CrowdStrike US$235.38 ▲ 13.85% | | Bank of America US$59.46 ▼ 5.15% |
| BIG TECH |
The people building AI asked for a slowdown, and the market sold their suppliers
Amodei published about 3,800 words on Saturday arguing that the industry has to slow the pace at which it improves model capabilities, because safety and oversight work needs time to catch up. Altman said he agreed with pacing the frontier, Musk posted that Dario is right, and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind said much the same thing. Monday was the first session anyone could price it in. Nvidia, one of our preferred stocks, fell 3.4% to US$210.86, and AMD dropped 4.4% to US$493.36.
Where the money went instead. CrowdStrike, also one of our preferred stocks, rose 13.85% to US$235.38. Palo Alto Networks gained about 11%, Zscaler about 12% and Okta about 13%. The reasoning is short. If AI is dangerous enough that the people making it want a speed limit, companies are going to spend more defending themselves from it. CrowdStrike's chief executive George Kurtz made the argument himself on Monday: the frontier labs will keep advancing whatever any single company decides, so the security industry's job is to make that advance safer.
There is an awkward footnote. The Information reported on Monday that Anthropic is the customer behind a six-year, US$13.7 billion computing contract with Rum Group, which owns the video platform Rumble, for a datacentre under construction in Maysville, Georgia. Rumble shares jumped on the news. Amodei's argument is about the speed of capability gains, and how much computing power a lab buys is a separate question. The market noticed the timing anyway.
The tell capital spending guidance from Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta, which report from late October. None of them has trimmed a datacentre budget yet. |
| ENERGY |
Saudi Arabia shut the pipeline that was keeping its oil away from the Strait of Hormuz
Brent crude rose more than 3% on Monday to about US$108 a barrel, and the American benchmark, WTI, went to about US$103. The cause is a 1,200 kilometre steel line running across Saudi Arabia. Drones launched from Maysan province in southern Iraq hit the East-West pipeline on Friday, and Saudi Aramco shut it while engineers work out how bad the damage is. The line carries crude from the Abqaiq fields in the east to Yanbu, on the Red Sea coast.
Why one pipeline matters this much. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted since March, and the East-West line has been the main way Saudi crude leaves the country without going anywhere near it. Close the pipeline and the bypass is gone. More bad news landed on Sunday, when the Muscat meeting at which Gulf foreign ministers were due to sign a navigation deal for the strait was postponed. That came hours after an attack on an Iranian commercial vessel killed one person. Oman's foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, said the delay was a joint decision with Tehran.
From there it moves quickly into everything else. Dearer crude lifts inflation expectations, and the US 10-year Treasury yield touched 5.014% on Monday, its highest since October 2023, before settling back near 4.95%. Futures markets now put a quarter-point Federal Reserve rate rise on Wednesday at about 85%.
What to watch how long the repair takes. Aramco fixed earlier damage to the same line in three days, and it has not yet said what this one looks like. |
| BANKING |
Bank of America told investors the deal boom has stopped, and lost 5% in a day
Brian Moynihan spent Monday at Barclays' annual financial services conference and gave the room a number. Bank of America expects third-quarter investment banking revenue of US$1.6 billion to US$1.8 billion, against US$2 billion in the same quarter last year, a fall of more than 10%. Trading revenue will be roughly flat. The shares closed at US$59.46, down 5.15%, and dragged most of the American banking sector with them.
Why a 10% dip hurt that much. Investment banking fees are what a bank earns for advising on takeovers and for underwriting share and bond sales, and they arrive in lumps rather than in a steady monthly stream. Three months ago Bank of America reported second-quarter investment banking fees up 50% and trading revenue up 33%, and investors had extended that line across the rest of the year. Moynihan also said the market as a whole is down about 10%, and that his bank is positioned worse than most in the corners that are still busy.
Takeovers and listings run on borrowed money, and on some confidence about what that money will cost next year. Neither is easy to come by with oil climbing and the Federal Reserve about to raise rates for the first time since 2023.
The short version the June quarter was the outlier. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley all report next month, so nobody has to guess for long. |
Newsworthy numbers
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1,200 AI agents that escaped a test environment at OpenAI in July and ran cyberattacks on Hugging Face's systems. Amodei cited the incident in his essay, which is one way to make a weekend argument land. | | 51.2 the BNZ-BusinessNZ services index for August, released Monday, and the strongest reading since September 2023. The employment sub-index is still below 50, so the hiring has not followed yet. |
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84.4 the Westpac-Melbourne Institute consumer sentiment index for September in Australia, down 5.2% on the month. It was the first fall since June, and households blamed petrol prices and the prospect of another rate rise. | | US$1.25m what an 1894-S Barber dime fetched at Stack's Bowers this month. Twenty-four were struck in San Francisco and nine have been accounted for since, which is a better survival rate than most things from 1894. |
Worth a read
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01 | Even a small rise in annual KiwiSaver fees will see them top $1 billion next year — Gareth Vaughan does the arithmetic: KiwiSaver members paid $978.2 million in fees in the March 2026 year, up 12.6%, and a 2.2% rise gets the industry over a billion. Fees have held at about 0.7% of funds under management while the funds themselves have grown. |
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02 | Mortgage war heats up as banks compete for customers by lowering variable rates — David Taylor on Australian lenders discounting to win refinancing business, with the sharpest variable rates near 5.69%. The broker's line about banks hoping you never ask for a better rate is worth the click on its own. |
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03 | One man's designer trash is another man's side hustle — There are more than 180,000 eBay listings for empty luxury packaging, and a watch box can go for thousands. The buyers are resellers, counterfeiters and people staging photographs of a life they do not have. |
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04 | Mercury Has Shrunk Even More than Planetary Scientists Thought — A German Aerospace Center team led by Gaku Nishiyama reworked the surface roughness data and found the planet has contracted by up to 23 kilometres across, against earlier estimates of 4 to 16. Cooling rock does this, and the new figure finally matches what the physics predicted. |
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05 | Unsealed for the First Time in 600 Years, This Tomb in Peru Was Just Declared the 'Discovery of the Decade' — Peruvian archaeologists opened an intact Chimú mausoleum at Chan Chan holding at least 38 people, along with gold, copper and textiles. Everything known about elite Chimú burial until now came from sites looters had already been through. |
Wrapping up
The Federal Reserve decides on Wednesday 16 September at 2pm in Washington, which is 6am Thursday in Auckland and 4am in Sydney. Futures put a quarter-point rise to 3.75–4.00% at about 85%, and fresh projections and a dot plot land with it. August retail sales come out the same morning at 8.30am New York time. The Bank of England follows on Thursday and the Bank of Japan on Friday.
Trip.com reports after Tuesday's close, where the line to watch is accommodation bookings. Lennar follows on Wednesday, with analysts expecting fiscal third-quarter earnings down about 35% to US$1.30 a share on revenue of US$8.4 billion, and the number that matters is what it is paying in buyer incentives now that 30-year mortgage rates are above 7%. Darden reports before Thursday's open and FedEx after the close. Locally, New Zealand's current account lands on Wednesday, June-quarter GDP on Thursday and August trade figures on Friday, while Australia gets the Westpac-Melbourne Institute leading index on Tuesday.
The kiwi fell 0.7% on Monday to a seven-week low, taking USD/NZD to 1.7316, and it is close to a 13-year low against the Australian dollar as the two central banks head in different directions. USD/AUD finished at 1.4006.
Back tomorrow with tonight's session.