Daily newsletter · Thu 8 Oct 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Thu 8 Oct 2026 |
 A Lender's Market Plus: SpaceX wants to borrow US$40 billion to buy Nvidia's chips. |
Good morning, and welcome to Thursday. America sold US$39 billion of 10-year government bonds on Wednesday at a yield of 5.300%, the highest at that auction since 2000. Buyers turned up in force, and that was the best news stocks got all day.
The S&P 500 slipped 0.22% from Tuesday's record, and the NASDAQ Composite fell by the same amount. The Dow lost 0.66%. Webull, a Florida broker with deep roots in China, had a far worse day.
In company news, Hess Midstream fell 14.63% after agreeing to buy out Chevron's stake and cut the fees it charges Chevron in the Bakken, and gave a 2027 forecast well below this year's. Elsewhere, Penguin Solutions jumped 13.08% because record quarterly results came with a higher outlook. Finally, Constellation Brands rose 2.35% after its quarterly profit beat forecasts.
Lenders, please form a queue.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,801.77 ▼ 0.22% | | NASDAQ 27,538.69 ▼ 0.22% | | NZX 50 13,684.04 ▼ 0.12% |
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ASX 200 8,727.73 ▼ 0.09% | | Webull US$5.89 ▼ 19.09% | | SpaceX US$167.60 ▼ 2.51% |
| BONDS |
Treasury yields touched a 24-year high, and then a US$39 billion bond sale calmed them down
The yield on 10-year Treasury bonds touched about 5.36% on Wednesday, its highest since April 2002. The 30-year yield reached 5.73%, a level last seen in May 2002.
Then the Treasury held its sale, and the buyers came. It sold US$39 billion of 10-year notes at 5.300%, and bids came in at 2.77 times the amount on offer. Peter Boockvar, who writes The Boock Report, said the 24-year highs themselves brought the buyers out.
The 10-year yield finished near 5.28%, barely changed on the day, and the 30-year at 5.66%. Stocks still felt the morning's spike. Banks fell on worries that dearer money slows lending, and the Russell 2000 index of smaller companies dropped 1.31%.
Minutes of the Fed's September meeting landed at 2pm in New York. Most officials thought another rise in the 3.75–4.00% range would likely be needed by the end of the year.
They disagreed on why. Some want to stop energy prices spreading into everything else. Many described a higher path as insurance in case demand runs hot, and several said current rates are barely restrictive at all.
Our read the auction mattered more than the minutes. The minutes repeated what the Fed signalled three weeks ago. The auction showed there is still a deep pool of buyers for American debt at 5.3%, and I'd want to see that hold before calling Wednesday's spike the top. |
| REGULATION |
A House committee called Webull's China ties a national security risk, and the shares lost 19.09%
Webull, the online share-trading app, fell 19.09% to US$5.89 on Wednesday. Its sharemarket value is now about US$3.2 billion.
So what did the committee find? The House Select Committee on China, which has members from both parties, released a report saying Webull's ownership, technical staff, technology and financing are tied to China in structural ways. It also flagged how customer data is routed across the border.
According to the report, a subsidiary in mainland China runs the platform's technology and operations. That back end is subject to Chinese laws that give Beijing broad powers to investigate. Committee chair John Moolenaar said the links "put American investors and their data at risk."
Webull is based in St Petersburg, Florida, and incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Wang Anquan, a former Alibaba and Xiaomi executive, founded it in 2016.
The report carries no fines or bans on its own. Webull's own filings already list government inquiries into its China connections as a risk to the business.
The tell what the regulators do next. A congressional report costs a company nothing until the SEC or another agency acts on it. Before then, Webull's monthly operating figures will show whether customers are moving their money elsewhere, and that matters more than one day's selling. |
| TECH |
SpaceX wants to borrow US$40 billion to buy Nvidia's chips, and its shares fell 2.51%
SpaceX fell 2.51% to US$167.60 on Wednesday. Late on Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that the company is seeking about US$40 billion of debt to buy Nvidia chips for its AI data centres.
Who lends that much money? About US$10 billion would come from bank loans and US$30 billion from investment-grade debt, the kind ratings agencies judge safer. Apollo Global Management is expected to lead, Pimco is in talks to take part, and the deal is due to close in 2027.
The spending is already bigger than the business. In the June quarter SpaceX spent US$18.37 billion on new assets, US$15.83 billion of it on AI, against revenue of US$7.81 billion.
xAI, the company behind the Grok chatbot, is now part of SpaceX. Elon Musk has said its Colossus 2 data centre could more than double the number of Nvidia chips it runs by December.
The money also goes round in a circle. Nvidia disclosed a stake of nearly US$21 billion in SpaceX in August, built up through its investment in xAI, and SpaceX now wants to borrow to buy Nvidia's products.
The catch Nvidia brings out a faster chip roughly every year, and this debt will be around for far longer than that. Morgan Stanley reckons AI infrastructure will need US$1.5 trillion of outside financing by 2028, so SpaceX is unlikely to be the last to ask. |
Newsworthy numbers
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80.3% the share of Wednesday's 10-year bond sale taken by indirect bidders, the group that includes foreign central banks. The average across the last ten sales is 72.4%. | | US$79 million what Levi Strauss got back in its latest quarter for tariffs collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. It raised its full-year profit forecast after Wednesday's close. |
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US$567 million Penguin Solutions' record quarterly sales, up 68% on a year earlier, on demand for the computers that run AI. | | 95 the age of Henri Kagan, who shared Wednesday's chemistry Nobel with Kenso Soai, 76, for work on making one mirror-image form of a molecule rather than both. Proof that the phone from Stockholm can still ring late. |
Worth a read
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01 | Motorists putting fuel on Afterpay as prices rise — Susan Edmunds on New Zealanders paying for petrol in instalments. One financial mentor says 80% of her clients' Afterpay debt is now fuel. |
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02 | The podless future of coffee pods — Danny Jensen on the push to get rid of the capsule. Keurig machines sit in roughly 47 million American households. |
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03 | Conflict in the Red Sea is forcing cloud giants to find a new route for the internet — Indranil Ghosh on why Google and Meta are now sending live traffic overland through Iraq. More than 90% of data capacity between Europe and Asia runs under the Red Sea. |
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04 | Earth's Center Is Moving, and NASA Just Measured It — Donald Argus's team at JPL tracked the planet's centre of mass shifting a few millimetres with the seasons. The movement is about half what scientists believed eight years ago. |
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05 | Microdramas are booming. AI could make it even harder to stop binge-watching — Johnny Chan of the University of Auckland on one-minute vertical soap operas. Chinese ones took US$7 billion in 2024, more than the country's cinemas. |
Wrapping up
Futures put the chance of an October Fed rise at about 17% this morning, down from about 22% on Tuesday. After the minutes, the market's bet is a hold this month and a rise in December. American weekly jobless claims are out at 1.30am Friday in Auckland and 11.30pm Thursday in Sydney.
In New Zealand, the Treasury publishes the government's accounts for the year to June at 1pm today, 11am in Sydney, a month before the election.
The kiwi slipped to near its weakest in almost a year, and USD/NZD rose to 1.79. USD/AUD rose to 1.44.
Record petrol prices here, so maybe walk to work. See you tomorrow.