Anthropic's potential IPO valuation could reach $2 trillion, according to recent reports.

Multiple companies are getting significant tariff refunds as trade policy adjustments take effect.

Generation Z investors are shifting capital away from stock market investments toward sports betting activities.

Netflix stock jumped after billionaire investor Bill Ackman revealed he had taken a new position in the streaming company.

The Treasury Department this week scrapped a key part of a federal anti-corruption law that required anonymous shell companies and other firms to disclose their owners.

Why it matters: The move is the latest example of how it's becoming harder to get information about the financial system, even as the ascendance of AI makes it seemingly easier to learn anything you want to know.

The rule was part of the Corporate Transparency Act, passed with bipartisan support at the end of President Trump's first term as part of a larger defense bill. Treasury said the rule was overly complicated and costly for small businesses.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement: "Treasury is eliminating a burdensome reporting requirement for millions of law-abiding business owners without compromising our national security."

Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said the Treasury's decision "undermines the clear intent of the law," noting that "The Act gave the federal government needed tools to address criminal activity like human trafficking, terrorist financing, drug distribution, sanctions evasion and more."

As of March, the database held 16.4 million reports, with only about 15,000 filed by foreign reporting companies, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Big Tech's massive data center spending binge hasn't put too much of a dent in a core gauge of corporate investing prowess.

Why it matters: Return on invested capital — or ROIC — aims to tell investors how good a company is at making money on all the cash that it has sunk into acquisitions, equipment, plants and other capital.

Profit margins can tell you about the basic economics of how much it costs to make a product and how much you can sell it for. But profit margins don't incorporate the upfront cost of investing in the factories and equipment needed to create or sustain a company. In the case of AI data centers, these are massive.

How it works: To calculate return on invested capital, you basically take after-tax operating profit at a company — a measure of the core business's earnings power — and divide it by average total invested capital, typically sourced from a company's quarterly balance sheet report.

The S&P 500 hit a fresh high yesterday, after another benign inflation report. U.S. stock futures are little changed this morning.

The bond market's chill is less apparent. At auction yesterday, the U.S. government sold 30-year bonds at a yield of 5.216% — the highest since 2001.

Reddit shares are up more than 12% premarket, after the news broke that the social media platform would join the S&P 500 index on Tuesday, replacing AvalonBay Communities.

As Anthropic preps for its initial public offering, there's a math puzzle not even its ultrafrontier models can solve: What's the right price?

On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic is in talks to pay $6 billion for startup Decart, which makes software that improves chip efficiency, reducing the cost of training and running AI. It's a big sign that it's reading the room on cheaper open-source models.

More and more US firms are right-sizing their AI needs to lower-cost (and often Chinese-made) open-source AI models, Citi said in a note to clients this summer. Meanwhile, SpaceX's xAI unit this week announced Grok 4.6, its latest AI model that scores dead even with OpenAI's top model and just behind Anthropic's ultra-powerful Opus 5 and Fable 5 Max models on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Worse for Anthropic, xAI boldly broke into the frontier while offering its model at roughly half the cost of Anthropic's best models, per the index.

Even DeepSeek, which made its name as the first cheap open-source Chinese alternative to expensive flagship US models, said on Thursday that it is upping the price of its models during "peak hours," moving from a previous price of $0.87 per 1 million output tokens for the V4-Pro model to $3.96. It will cost half that during non-peak hours. Grok 4.6 is offered at $6, while Claude Opus 5 runs for $25.

Elon Musk is defining egalitarianism drastically downward. The average CEO-to-worker pay ratio at S&P 500 companies rose to 312-to-1 last year, up from 285-to-1 in 2024, according to data released by the AFL-CIO on Thursday. But that figure doesn't include Musk.

The labor group estimates Tesla's CEO earned 2,522,203 times the compensation of a median employee at the company. If Musk's outlier compensation package, which included a restricted stock plan valued at $158.3 billion, is taken into account, the 2025 S&P 500 CEO-to-worker pay ratio jumps to 5,387:1.

The AFL-CIO said Musk last year earned compensation equal to the total annual pay of a median Tesla employee every 4.23 seconds.

The SEC canceled its planned Reg Crypto meeting, gave no new date, and is delaying its "innovation exemption" for tokenized securities after pressure from the White House — which doesn't want to complicate Clarity Act negotiations — and from Wall Street's trade groups.

BTC ETFs flipped to outflows this week, reversing last week's $853 million inflow run. The 30-year Treasury yield drew 5.22% at auction — the highest since 2001. And XRP is teetering at exactly $1.

The SEC unexpectedly called off its high-stakes crypto meeting, scrubbing a planned vote on landmark fundraising exemptions for startups.

Bitcoin and equities now show textbook regime divergence. The same risk-on tape leaves Bitcoin stranded near $63,000 with the quietest spot volume since 2019, while eight of eleven S&P 500 sectors printed solid gains today, led by an unstoppable artificial intelligence bid.

Bitcoin is currently undergoing a brutal volatility squeeze, completely detached from legacy risk-on momentum. Liquidity is bleeding from alts with retail traders completely on the sidelines.

Risk assets continue to find breathing room even as elevated crude oil prices near $89 and Middle East geopolitical risks linger in the background. Fed policy remains data-dependent with no immediate hike pressure, allowing traditional markets to hold their recent gains while digital assets digest the broader tape.

Bitcoin remains tightly coiled near $63,000. Institutional capital is quietly absorbing supply while long-term holders continue stacking through the noise. On-chain data shows liquidity building underneath, setting the stage for rotation into high-throughput settlement rails.

Retail sales fell 0.6% in July, the weakest performance in more than a year and well below the 0.1% gain analysts expected. Excluding gas stations and auto dealers, there was still a 0.3% decline in sales, meaning that the weakness was evident even apart from those volatile categories. Auto dealers' sales were down 2%, gasoline stations' sales fell 0.9%, and electronic and appliance store sales declined 0.5%.

Consumer sentiment fell 8% in early August, with the index falling to 51 from 55.2 in July. The steepest month-to-month drop in sentiment was among survey respondents who identify as Republicans, with their outlook now 19% below readings from just before the Iran war and at the lowest since the 2024 election.

Only 8% of consumers expect their income growth to exceed inflation in the year ahead, down from 18% in December 2024, a reflection of the belief that high prices will continue to be burdensome.

Figure Technology (FIGR) Q2 Results:

Figure took a smaller cut out of every loan dollar handled last quarter compared to a year ago, yet made more money on each loan anyway. The net take rate slid from 4.0% to 3.6%, while adjusted EBITDA margin went the other way, hitting 54.6% against 47.2% a year ago.

Key metrics:

• Loan volume: $4.26B, up 132%
• Net revenue: $226M, up 113%
• Net income: $87M, up 192%
• Diluted earnings: $0.35 per share against $0.23 expected

Figure Connect drove the results: The marketplace where outside lenders bring their own borrowers hit 65% of all marketplace volume last quarter, up from 42% a year ago ($2.77B of the $4.26B in volume). Because Figure doesn't pay to find those borrowers, it can charge partners less and still keep more of what it charges. 489 lenders now originate on Figure's system, 102 added in Q2 alone. Operations and processing costs fell to 67 basis points of loan volume, down from 79 a year ago.