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Stocks stepped on a rake yesterday as investors were unmoved by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's attempt to intervene in the bond market crisis. SpaceX sank for the third straight day as ~319 million more shares became eligible for early investors to sell.

Samsung Electronics has announced a $78.9 billion buyback, surpassing SK Hynix's $28.8 billion repurchase announced the day prior.

The Treasury Department's unusual bond market intervention Wednesday is prompting questions about its commitment to a longstanding cornerstone of American economic statecraft: the strong dollar policy.

Why it matters: The "strong dollar policy" is shorthand for the U.S. government's commitment to policies guided by economic orthodoxy — concern over debt and deficits, non-intervention in markets and central bank independence, among them — that have for the most part characterized both parties' management of the economy for decades.

Yes, but: As the department's move in the U.S. Treasury market Wednesday showed, the current administration appears willing to jettison such niceties to achieve its goals.

The latest: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on CNBC yesterday morning emphasizing that the Treasury could buy back more than the $4 billion in long-term U.S. government bonds, the headline number it cited Wednesday in announcing plans to double the size of the auctions it uses to repurchase bonds from market participants.

What they're saying: Wall Street thinks lower rates were clearly the goal of the Treasury move. "We see a through-line here across a number of policy actions from Treasury in recent weeks, and believe Treasury is uncomfortable with the rise in long-term yields, as it runs against the Secretary's stated goal," JPMorgan bond market analysts wrote. "In our view, Treasury increased these operations to limit the long-end selloff. This was not done for market functioning purposes," Citigroup bond market analysts added.

Between the lines: The consensus takeaway on Wall Street seems to be that the "debasement trade" — a bet on a weakening U.S. dollar — is back on. "Expressions of debasement fears are a weaker USD and long gold," Citi analysts wrote. "We do not doubt the ability of the U.S. Treasury to keep yields contained for quite some time. The main price to pay for lowering rates in such a way is a weaker currency." "Markets are primed for dollar debasement to resume," wrote Robin Brooks, a Brookings Institution fellow who formerly headed up foreign-exchange strategy at Goldman Sachs. "As Japan shows, it can be next to impossible to stabilize a currency once it enters a devaluation spiral. The U.S. is playing with fire with this buyback."

The apparent goal of the Treasury Department's announcement on Wednesday — at least in Wall Street's estimation — was lowering long-term bond yields. It worked, but not for long.

The latest: Long-term Treasury securities again sold off yesterday, pushing prices down and yields — which move in the opposite direction — higher.

• Shortly before 5pm ET, the yield on the 30-year bond was hovering around 5.25%.
• For comparison, the yield on the long bond was around 5.28% ahead of the Treasury's announcement.

Our thought bubble: Three basis points, or 0.03 percentage points, on the bond doesn't seem like a huge payoff for putting the credibility of the U.S. Treasury on the line.

Hui Ka Yan, 67-year-old founder of property giant Evergrande, learned all his assets are being confiscated and that he will spend the rest of his life in prison. The Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court handed him the sentence for embezzlement of assets and corporate bribery, five years after Evergrande defaulted on most of its $300 billion in liabilities.

The court also fined companies with ties to Hui $2.3 billion for concealing debt and falsifying records. Evergrande's failure exposed investors, stressed parts of China's banking system, and sparked an ongoing, nationwide real estate crisis.

While data centers may have become Wall Street's wizard of alts, there are other, perhaps more mundane, infrastructure opportunities that might deserve a closer look. Demand for energy infrastructure, which was flat for decades, is now growing again amidt the needs of artificial intelligence and the shift toward renewable energy. Unfortunately, our current grid is straining to keep up. That opens the door to a broader set of infrastructure plays that are easier for Main Street investors to access than in cycles past, giving advisors new tools to diversify client portfolios beyond the increasingly crowded data center trade.

"We believe data centers are, at least today, somewhat overhyped," said Irina Zilbergleyt, managing director at I Squared Capital. "They are attracting a tremendous amount of attention, which means a lot of capital is bidding for the same assets and driving up prices. If you win an asset in that environment, there is real risk you have overpaid."

Developed countries have underinvested in infrastructure for decades, and it's starting to catch up with them. Transitioning to renewable energy like wind, solar, and hydropower requires costly grid upgrades.

For standard Main Street clients who need full liquidity, advisors favor commodities funds over infrastructure funds. Higher net worth clients should consider private equity or private credit funds, in order to invest directly in a physical product. Mass affluent clients can get similar direct access through interval funds, which provide more liquidity, and which offer a level of access that wasn't available during the last infrastructure boom.

Advisors shouldn't think of infrastructure as a total return play, and should make sure the product they're in generates income. "You do have periods of lackluster returns," experts cautioned. "When you're not seeing the boom happen immediately or [you're in] the spheres where it ebbs and flows, having that income strand is key … You want to look at this as a long-term hold."

Bitcoin has surged past $75,000 and reclaimed its 200-day SMA for the first time since November 2025, breaking out with volume while recovering its long-term trendline. Spot Bitcoin ETFs just posted $606 million in inflows on August 20, the strongest single day in four months. On-chain demand has flipped positive in both spot and perpetual futures for the first time since October 2025, with high-conviction buyers continuing to accumulate at a larger supply share than the 2022 cycle, and taker buy volume sitting in a historical exhaustion zone.

Treasury Secretary Bessent's move to at least double longer-dated bond buybacks to $4 billion is injecting a liquidity tailwind that echoes the March 2023 regime shift, while a softer DXY and heavy short liquidations have amplified the advance. The next real test is the ETF cost-basis zone; if it holds, this looks less like a bounce and more like the exit from bear-market conditions.

The 77-day market consolidation has officially broken to the upside. Bitcoin printed its biggest daily expansion candle in ten months, punching through key structural hurdles. This aggressive expansion makes a nonsense of the persistent summer chop.

Global capital allocators are buying risk assets again. Traders are repositioning for renewed central bank accommodation, and geopolitical risk premiums are narrowing. Crypto Market spot demand turns aggressive positive on centralized exchanges. Macro trading desks anticipate a significant easing in global financial conditions.

This momentum is nothing like the low-volume bounces seen in recent months. Research suggests a confirmed regime shift in equities and credit markets.

U.S. business activity grew at the fastest pace since 2022 in August, according to S&P Global's flash PMI. A jump in services offset slower manufacturing growth. Price pressures cooled and hiring picked up to the fastest pace since January 2025.

Europe is accumulating trade deficits with China at a record pace of roughly $1.15 billion per day, which the EU's top trade official calls "clearly unsustainable." The China-fueled economic upheaval that helped transform American politics is now hitting Europe, building pressure for the continent to embrace the type of China crackdown it has long resisted.

The concept of the 'China shock' is becoming more international. German employment in motor vehicles, trailers and semi-trailers fell from 754,016 in January 2005 to a low of 697,381 in May 2026.

Germany now buys more high-end machinery and factory equipment from China than it sells there, a reversal of a decadelong pattern. Its trade balance in those goods swung to a $600 million deficit from a $900 million surplus in less than one year.

EU imports of cars from China topped 1 million for the first time last year, an increase of roughly 30% from 2024, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association.

Volkswagen, which opposed the EU tariffs on Chinese EVs two years ago, is now pressing European policymakers to move faster to protect the industry from Chinese competition. CEO Oliver Blume told investors that he expects European policymakers to act this year. "We have no time to lose," he said, signaling that the China trade pressure has reached a new level.

The floor price of StonkBrokers NFTs has surged from less than $400 a month ago to $13,000 today. The NFTs are represented by pixelated stock brokers, but the artwork is not what made them the second-most valuable NFTs on OpenSea (behind CryptoPunks and ahead of Bored Apes).

Instead, it's because each NFT is also a wallet that can hold crypto assets, including tokenized stocks. Each NFT receives a randomly selected tokenized stock when it's minted (SpaceX, say, or Amazon). When it's also "activated" (for a fee, paid in the StonkBroker token), it receives additional stocks that the protocol buys with the fees it earns. When an NFT is sold, everything in the wallet moves with it.

0xResearch describes the mechanics as an attempt to connect "NFTs, tokenized equities, a liquid token, a launchpad and an exchange into one financial ecosystem."

fomo is a trading app that aims to become a social media platform by bringing people together over their love for memecoins. Despite launching in a brutal bear market, fomo has hosted over $4 billion in trading volume and attracted 1.3 million users in just over a year.

The app makes memecoin trading both social and competitive: everyone's trades are public and linked to their account, there's a leaderboard, there's copy trading. Some of fomo's most successful traders have amassed over 100,000 followers each. Fomo is currently a top-10 app in the "finance" category of the Apple App Store.

The company recently raised $75 million in a Series B at a valuation of $550 million (there's no token).

A Dune dashboard finds that only 6% of all traders on FOMO in the last 90 days were profitable. Of the 6% of traders who are profitable, 88% have made under $100. Only 25 out of 292,531 wallets made more than $10,000. Collectively, fomo traders have lost an estimated $1.26 billion.

Bitcoin has jumped from roughly $64,000 to $77,000 in less than 48 hours, driven by the U.S. Treasury's announcement of bond buybacks. If Bitcoin closes Sunday night above $74,200, it will mark the single biggest weekly gain in dollar terms in Bitcoin's history.

The initial move higher appears to have been driven by a squeeze. Now, spot buyers and ETF flows are starting to support the rally too.

Ethereum is doing even better than Bitcoin during this week's rally, according to the newsletter headline and analysis of crypto market performance.