Wall Street consensus already points toward another interest rate hike. The Crucial FOMC Releases Its Latest Economic Projections Wall Street consensus already points toward another interest rate hike. Sep 16 READ IN APP None of this is financial advice. Do your own research. By reading this newsletter, you acknowledge and accept the terms and conditions outlined in our disclaimer . GM Investors The FOMC prints in a few hours, and Bitcoin is already walking into the room bruised. Tuesday’s Senate cloture vote killed the CLARITY Act 49–50. That flushed the complex from the high $77,000s toward $74,900. Overnight the argument shifted from Capitol Hill to Constitution Avenue. The FOMC statement lands at 2:00 p.m. ET. The new dot plot and SEP come in the same packet. This is not a cut FOMC. Rate futures have a 25 basis point hike and that would lift the funds target from 3.50–3.75% to 3.75–4.00%. It would be the first Rate change of the Warsh chairmanship. Trump hired him to ease. The FOMC tape is asking him to do the opposite. Equities futures are only slightly green after six down sessions in seven. Crypto already paid for regulatory theater. Now it has to pay for Fed policy. The FOMC hike is in the price. The path after the FOMC is not. Here’s what our desk is watching. TOKEN2049 Singapore: Find the Next Hyperliquid Before It Lists!!! Every year, one conference produces the startups that dominate the next cycle. This year, it’s TOKEN2049 Singapore. TOKEN2049 Origins Hackathon: 36 hours, $100K prize pool, direct demo access to the main stage. This is where the next cycle’s infrastructure gets built live. 500 applicants, 10 finalists, 1 global stage. Past cohorts have gone on to become Web3 unicorns. 25,000 people. 7,000 companies. 60%+ C-suite. 160+ countries. One building: Marina Bay Sands. Newsletter readers get 10% off tickets. We don’t get a kickback. We just want our people in that room. Claim your 10% discount and register The FOMC Decision Is Not the Trade Our research treats this FOMC as a communication event wearing a rate decision. A 25 basis point move is the base case across the market but Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and RBC still want 75 basis points of tightening in 2026. That spread is the trade. Warsh set this FOMC up at Jackson Hole. “Otherwise, we have work to do” flipped September hike odds from the mid-30s toward 56% in a day. August CPI then finished the job. Headline inflation is 3.4%. Core is sticky. Oil above $100 is not helping the inflation case the FOMC has to write, even after Wednesday’s inventory print pulled WTI back toward $104 and Brent toward $108. The political overlay is loud. Trump has spent two weeks telling Warsh not to hike. Markets still price the FOMC hike. That is the tell. Our desk does not fade a 90% priced FOMC move on a press-conference hope. We fade the idea that the statement is the whole story. September is one of four FOMC meetings that carry a fresh set of dots. June already showed the fracture. Nine of 18 officials penciled in at least one 2026 hike then. Six of those nine wanted two. Warsh refused to submit his own dot. He will have a harder time hiding that at this FOMC. History is not the scare tape some traders want. Across 12 postwar hiking cycles with at least five hikes, the S&P 500 averaged +11.1%. The path was ugly. The destination was not. The last four first-hike days were all green: +1.6%, +0.4%, +1.5%, and +2.2%. JPMorgan’s FOMC scenario set still spans roughly −2% to +1% on the S&P. That range is the honest admission. The committee can hike and soothe, hike and threaten, or hike and split on the dots. Geopolitical risk is in the same room as this FOMC. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline is still a live supply story. Houthi pressure on Gulf routes has kept oil prices elevated even as U.S. inventories rose. That is why semiconductor stocks and high-duration equities cannot treat FOMC day as a clean rates session. Bitcoin sits in the middle of that stack. Spot ETFs bled about $463 million across four sessions into last week, then took back $160 million on Monday into IBIT and FBTC. That is concentrated re-entry after a flush, not two-way conviction. On-chain data and derivatives both show traders cutting exposure into the FOMC, not loading it. The first hike in 38 months does not need to surprise. It needs to tell the market whether this FOMC is one move or the start of a path. Crypto market analysis that stops at “hike or no hike” is already stale. That is why the 2:30 p.m. press conference matters more than the 25 basis points. Warsh’s job after this FOMC is less the rate and more the credibility of how the Fed reads inflation, growth, and the bond market. With the 10-year already in the 5% area, another leg higher in yields is the cleanest way to pressure Bitcoin, altcoins, and rate-sensitive equities together. Clarity Broke. The FOMC Still Has to Speak. Yesterday the Senate voted 49–50 against cloture on H.R. 3633. The bill needed 60 votes. It got none from Democrats and lost four Republicans: Collins, Hawley, Moran, and Tillis. Tillis voted no to preserve a motion to reconsider. That is procedure, not a rescue. Polymarket cut the odds of CLARITY becoming law this year from about 29% on Monday to the mid-single digits. The market reaction was mechanical. Bitcoin fell from the high $77,000s toward $74,900 in the first 20 minutes. Ethereum lost the $2,400 handle. Coin Bureau’s tape put XRP down 10%, ETH down 5.7%, and SOL down 5.8%. Bull Theory clocked $275 million of longs liquidated in 20 minutes and nearly $70 billion erased from crypto market cap. CoinGlass’s 24-hour print ran above $330 million across roughly 80,000 accounts. Coinbase closed about 8–10% lower. Circle dropped more than 11%. Our desk does not need a conspiracy theory to read the flow. Large desks sold into the vote. Forced liquidations did the rest. That is how thin books work when a binary Washington event hits a leveraged market the night before an F

Tuesday’s Clarity Act failure leaves Bitcoin Bruised 🚨5 Levels To Watch as FOMC Countdown is Near Tuesday’s Clarity Act failure leaves Bitcoin Bruised Sep 16 READ IN APP None of this is financial advice. Do your own research. By reading this newsletter, you acknowledge and accept the terms and conditions outlined in our disclaimer . Hey Traders, Oil is still doing the inflation work. Crude eased off the highs after a larger U.S. inventory build, but the Saudi East-West outage and Gulf shipping risk have not left the tape. Energy is still the first input into the Fed’s problem, not a clean demand story. Bonds are not hedging it. The 10-year is sitting on 5% into this afternoon’s FOMC, a 25 basis point hike is the base case, and equities are treating that as a tightening problem rather than a buy-the-dip. Futures are only modestly bid after a weak week. Chips have a few stock-specific bids, not a broad growth bid. Bitcoin is trading the policy calendar, not a crash tape. Tuesday’s Clarity failure already took the regulatory bid out of crypto. Today the question is Warsh — the hike is priced, the path is not. Here is what we are watching. Poll of the Day ( Presented by Rain Trade ) 🎯 POLL Trading apps dominate record on-chain protocol fees. What sector leads next? 🦄 DEXs 📈 Perps 🎲 Predictions Today’s Charts: Chart #1 – Ripple(XRPUSDT) 1-Day Chart #2 – Aave(AAVESDT) 1-Day Chart #3 – Algorand(ALGOUSDT) 1-Day Chart #4 – ONDO(ONDOUSDT) 1-Day Chart #5 – Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) 4-Hour TOKEN2049 Singapore: Find the Next Hyperliquid Before It Lists!!! Every year, one conference produces the startups that dominate the next cycle. This year, it’s TOKEN2049 Singapore. TOKEN2049 Origins Hackathon: 36 hours, $100K prize pool, direct demo access to the main stage. This is where the next cycle’s infrastructure gets built live. 500 applicants, 10 finalists, 1 global stage. Past cohorts have gone on to become Web3 unicorns. 25,000 people. 7,000 companies. 60%+ C-suite. 160+ countries. One building: Marina Bay Sands. Newsletter readers get 10% off tickets. We don’t get a kickback. We just want our people in that room. Claim your 10% discount and register Chart #1 – Ripple(XRPUSDT) 1-Day( Powered by Rain Trade 📊) Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) XRP has printed an aggressive distribution impulse off its lower-high structure near $1.4800, slicing through local consolidation support to trade around $1.2732 on the 1-day timeframe. Powered by the XRP Ledger (XRPL) consensus mechanism, XRP serves as an ultra-fast, energy-efficient bridge currency optimized for institutional cross-border liquidity, tokenized settlement, and enterprise payment rail integration. This short trade setup targets an extended mean-reversion drop toward the $1.0000–$1.0200 liquidity pool as long as overhead resistance caps relief rallies below the $1.3450–$1.4850 zone. Trade Levels: Entry: $1.34 Stop Loss: $1.49 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $1.165 TP2: $1.036 Powerful narratives create powerful moves. With 247 Research , you get the insights to be early to the biggest trends in crypto. Chart #2 – Aave(AAVESDT) 1-Day( Powered by Rain Trade ) Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) Aave has triggered a distribution impulse off its local double-top near $145.00, breaking below its local consolidation shelf to trade around $117.10 on the 1-day timeframe. As a premier non-custodial decentralized liquidity market protocol, Aave enables users to lend, borrow, and earn yield across diverse crypto assets and cross-chain deployments via pooled reserves and its native multi-collateral stablecoin, GHO. This short trade setup targets an extended mean-reversion drop toward the $88.00–$90.00 liquidity shelf as long as overhead resistance caps pullbacks below the $123.00–$136.00 zone. Trade Levels: Entry: $124 Stop Loss: $137 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $86 TP2: $103 Chart #3 – Algorand(ALGOUSDT) 1-Day( Powered by Rain Trade 📊) Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) Algorand has defended its ascending structure with a bullish continuation candle off the retest shelf, sustaining price above the $0.0951 horizontal pivot to trade near $0.0981 on the daily timeframe. Designed as a highly scalable, carbon-negative Layer-1 blockchain powered by Pure Proof-of-Stake (PPoS) consensus to deliver instant finality, low transaction costs, and institutional-grade infrastructure for decentralized finance and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, this long trade setup targets an upward expansion toward the $0.1189 overhead resistance target as long as the $0.0872–$0.0951 support base holds. Trade Levels: Entry: $0.096 Stop Loss: $0.072 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $0.104 TP2: $0.118 Chart #4 – ONDO(ONDOUSDT) 1-Day( Powered by Rain Trade 📊) Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) ONDO has pulled back into a key confluence retest of its multi-month ascending trendline and horizontal demand shelf, defending the $0.2941 pivot to trade near $0.3295 on the 1-day timeframe. As an institutional-grade decentralized finance protocol leading the real-world asset (RWA) space, Ondo bridges traditional capital markets and blockchain networks by tokenizing yield-bearing U.S. Treasuries (OUSG) and money-market instruments with compliance-first infrastructure. This long trade setup targets an upward expansion toward the $0.4978 overhead resistance target as long as the $0.2343–$0.2941 support base holds. Trade Levels: Entry: $0.294 Stop Loss: $0.234 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $0.385 TP2: $0.497 Markets go both ways. Get premium short setups delivered every day with 247 Research . Chart #5 – Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) 4-Hour( Powered by Rain Trade 📊) Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) (AMD refers to the stock of Advanced Micro Devices and not a cryptocurrency.) AMD has confirmed an impulsive breakout above its multi-week consolidation base, reclaiming the $513.68 horizontal shelf with a strong green candle to trade around $524.74 on

Raoul Pal breaks down how to right this ship... All this AI and productivity is shrinking? Raoul Pal breaks down how to right this ship... Chevy Cassar GM, this is Milk Road Stocks, the newsletter giving you the best of the market in 5 minutes or less. Yesterday, we sat down with Raoul Pal to talk about what the economy needs to continue growing over the coming decades. Today we’re breaking down his thesis. First, a quick detour to private markets. On Sept 23, Milk Road's Martin sits down with Alumni Ventures to talk about blockchain and private markets. Save your free seat here. AMAZON IS A COUNTRY, AND WASHINGTON WANTS THE REST OF US TO COPY IT 🤖 We had Raoul Pal (CEO of Real Vision) on The Milk Road Show yesterday, and he spent a good chunk of it explaining where economic growth actually comes from. His formula: GDP growth = population growth + productivity growth + debt growth. I.e. More workers + better workers + borrowed money = economic growth. But that formula is breaking down… Baby boomers are leaving the workforce, and there aren't enough people behind them to fill the gaps they left. U.S. labor force participation (the share of adults either working or looking for work) peaked at 67.1% in 2000 and currently sits at 61.6%. 👇 Source: BLS Then there's the borrowing… Gross national debt crossed $40T in August (yikes!). Raoul pointed out that, since 2008, most new borrowing has gone toward refinancing the old borrowing rather than funding anything new. So that lever is technically still there, but it’s kinda jammed. Which leaves productivity… Kevin Warsh took over as Fed chair in May, and one of the first things he did was stand up five task forces. One is dedicated to productivity and jobs, with a remit to survey the economic impact of AI specifically. Then at Jackson Hole in August he called AI "structurally disinflationary" and said the potential for substantially higher growth is on the rise. I.e. If productivity climbs, he gets to keep rates lower without inflation turning up to ruin it. So what does that look like inside an actual company? Raoul's example is Amazon. They spent the back half of the 2010s pouring money into warehouse robotics - and for a long time it looked like nothing was happening. Profit per worker wobbled sideways, before falling off a cliff in 2022. But then, all of a sudden: payoff hit. Amazon's operating profit per employee went from roughly $7.9K in 2022 to about $50.8K last year, while headcount barely budged from where it sat in 2021. Source: Amazon The way Raoul put it: you should treat Amazon as a country, because the whole U.S. economy needs to follow its path. (Fewer workers → more machines → better margins out the other side.) Problem is, it hasn't shown up in the national numbers yet. Official productivity growth across this business cycle (so, since late 2019) has run at 2.1% a year. Which beats the 1.5% of the 2007 to 2019 stretch, and lands exactly on the long-run average going back to 1987. (All that AI compute, and the numbers look thoroughly ordinary.) Source: BLS What’s nuts is - productivity has been slowing this year. Annual productivity growth was 3.0% in 2024, 2.1% in 2025, and the first two quarters of this year came in at 0.3% and 1.4%. Long story longer: We all need to be keeping a close eye on the productivity number. Warsh has already called AI disinflationary and argued the Fed can hold rates lower because of it - so if productivity starts to inflect, he's got the argument he needs to cut (which would lift risk assets along the way). If it keeps coming in average, the gains will likely stay concentrated within a dozen or so companies rather than spreading out across the U.S. economy. Btw, this was just a small snippet of what we covered in yesterday’s discussion with Raoul. If you haven’t already watched the full episode, you can do so here! FREE SEMINAR ON BLOCKCHAIN & PRIVATE MARKETS Is VC capital still flowing into crypto or has AI taken it all? Where is venture capital actually deploying across crypto and fintech right now? Join Sophia Zhao (Partner at Alumni Ventures ) and Martin from Milk Road for a live fireside conversation covering: Where capital is moving across blockchain and fintech What the next generation of blockchain companies are actually building How accredited investors can get exposure to private markets The best part? It’s completely free to attend and takes just one hour. Save your free seat here. This content is for educational purposes only. Read full disclaimer Interested in reaching smart readers like you? Sponsor Milk Road Update your email preferences or unsubscribe here © 2026 ImpactDM Inc. operating as Milk Road Stocks 1257 Dundas St W Toronto, Ontario M6J1X6, Canada

The Fed’s big interest rate decision is today... September 16, 2026 Presented By Buongiorno. Today marks 100 days until Christmas. That breeze you’re feeling is from Mariah Carey suddenly sitting up like The Undertaker . —Matty Merritt, Sam Klebanov, Dave Lozo, Adam Epstein, Neal Freyman In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into: The Fed’s big decision today Canada’s financial pitch to the world Japan’s soaring number of centenarians Markets Nasdaq 25,981.57 -0.78% S&P 7,585.73 -0.45% Dow 52,093.11 -0.63% 10-Year 4.996% +4.0 bps Bitcoin $75,818.58 -4.14% Oil $108.8 +2.95% Data is provided by *Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 4:30pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean. Markets: Stocks stumbled yesterday in anticipation of today’s interest-rate decision by the Fed (more on that below). Meanwhile, Brent crude oil prices remained well above $100 per barrel as Iran-backed Houthis attacked Saudi Arabia. VESTED INTEREST There’s a good chance interest rates go up today Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Win McNamee/Getty Images, Artur Widak/Getty Images Like your athletic friend on a group trip, Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh is likely to pitch a hike today. Thanks to last week’s worse-than-expected inflation report and oil prices skyrocketing due to the Iran war, economists expect the Fed to hike interest rates today for the first time in three years: A majority of the 29 fund managers and strategists surveyed by CNBC believe at least two rate hikes over the next year are more likely than not. The CME FedWatch Tool shows markets hovering around a 92% chance of a 25-basis-point hike today, a jump from last week’s 70% probability. The 10-year Treasury yield hit 5.04% yesterday, its highest level in 19 years, before closing lower. The yield is a benchmark for consumer and corporate lending, and its rise signals a likely Fed rate increase. Where is Warsh’s head at? Despite Warsh’s quieter approach to decisions, he noted that inflation reports “do not tell me that underlying trends have improved” in a recent speech last month at the Economic Policy Symposium in Jackson Hole, WY. Warsh has also said he wants to take a hands-off approach to determining interest rates—the opposite of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s bond buyback flop . The politics of monetary policy President Trump spent the end of Jerome Powell’s eight-year tenure beefing with the former Fed chair over his reluctance to lower interest rates, eventually nominating Warsh to take his place. Kevin Hassett, the White House National Economic Council director, claimed in a TV interview this weekend that inflation was improving, but said Trump supports the Fed’s right to make an independent decision. Bottom line: Today’s potential rate hike could create a headache for Trump and the Republican Party, as it comes just ahead of a tense midterm election, with many economic warning signs flashing red.— MM Sponsored By Mizzen+Main Built of better fiber Most brands start with the style. Mizzen+Main starts with perfecting the finest details, which makes a huge difference if you’ve ever had a shirt fall apart after three washes. Before they reengineer classic styles for the modern world , they start with fiber as the foundation. And because they believe success starts with the best materials, they never settle for selecting second best. Think timeless cuts for a life that doesn’t sit still, made from performance fabrics that are moisture-wicking, machine washable, and wrinkle-resistant. Their entire fall collection is full of fits built for the office, the airport, and whatever the day turns into after that. Take 20% off with BREW20 . World Tour de headlines Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images 🏛️ Kennedy Center board votes to close building. The Trump-appointed board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted to shutter its main building, the Associated Press reported. The move came hours after a judge blocked the board from putting the president’s name on its building or naming its campus after him. “Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” the judge wrote. The board, which Trump chairs, added the president’s name to the building’s facade last year before it was ordered to be removed. It has also tried to rename the center’s campus to “The President Donald J. Trump Plaza.” 🗳️ Senate votes against advancing landmark crypto bill. In a 49–50 vote, the Senate blocked legislation to create a regulatory framework for the crypto industry. The industry-backed bill needed 60 votes to move forward, but the chamber’s Democrats said it lacked safeguards to prevent President Trump and his family from enriching themselves. Trump had agreed to part of an ethics provision to the bill, but Democrats argued it didn’t go far enough. The result is a major roadblock for the crypto industry, which had pushed for a new set of rules that could have further unlocked the digital assets’ political power. 🛰️ US military confirms it has weapons in space. For the first time, the US acknowledged that it has deployed weapons in orbit . “We are increasing readiness against existing threats, and the United States has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action,” Air Force Secretary Troy E. Meink said in a speech. He did not divulge what kind of weapons they are or where they’re located. According to the New York Times, the US military has been preparing for years to counter Russia and China’s growing operations in space. The two countries reportedly have spacecraft that can threaten US satellites and ground troops. —AE INVEST IN US NOT THE US Canada woos investors with dozens of projects Valerie Macon/Getty Images Canada is handing the world a Cheesecake Factory-thick menu with CAD$1 trillion of investment opportunities in projects across AI, natural resources and transportation. Prime

Plus: Premium pressure | Wednesday, September 16, 2026 Axios Markets By Emily Peck and Matt Phillips · Sep 16, 2026 🌅 Good Fed Wednesday morning! Things are fairly muted out there, with S&P 500 futures up a smidge and the yield on the 10-year Treasury still hovering around 5%. Crude is down a bit after rising in 10 of its previous 11 sessions. 👀 Big day ahead — you may want to hydrate. Investors are waiting on the Federal Reserve's rate decision and chairman Kevin Warsh's turn in front of reporters this afternoon. Looking further ahead, OpenAI has talked to investors about a funding round that could value ChatGPT's parent at $1.2 trillion or more before an expected initial public offering, say multiple reports . 🗓️ In the meantime, we muse on the uncomfortable investor murmurings over rising interest rates. Plus, a look at ERP. Those happen to be Emily's initials, but you'll have to read on to figure out what they stand for in Markets-land. Let's go! In 1,006 words, a 4-minute read. 1 big thing: Investors are now paying close attention to rates Data: Federal Reserve; Chart: Axios/Matt Phillips If rising interest rates are stock market kryptonite, investors are confronting a big chunk of that otherworldly mineral right now. The big picture: The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, seen as the most important interest rate in the world, has hit its highest level — 5.04% — since 2007. This means that the price of money has gone up for everyone from the middle-class homebuyer to the behemoth corporation. Zoom out: In the past, higher rates on government bonds, or yields, have often meant lower stock prices. There are a few theories why: Higher borrowing costs for corporations can slow economic growth and eat into profits, thus making stocks less attractive investments. It also makes riskier investments like stocks less alluring relative to higher-yielding and safer Treasury securities. Higher rates are also a key input for the discounted cash flow formulas used by finance and investment professionals to calculate what stocks should be worth. (TL;DR: When rates rise, all else equal, the stock values produced by these formulas go down.) The intrigue: So far, there hasn't been too much of an adjustment from the stock market to the spike in bond yields. The S&P 500 is still up 10.8% for the year as of yesterday's close and not far off the all-time high it touched just over a month ago. Yes, but: If you listen carefully, you'll hear the uncomfortable murmuring of investors, as they eyeball rising rates alongside portfolios often heavily weighted to equities. Case in point: Results of a new Bank of America survey of stock market fund managers showed that they see a "disorderly rise in bond yields" as the biggest "tail risk" to the market in September, replacing worries about an AI bubble. And the net share of respondents who expect short-term rates to go up is now higher than it was back in 2022, when the post-COVID inflation was starting to rage. U.S. equities market analysts at Goldman Sachs noted that "our recent conversations with both corporate executives and portfolio managers have focused on the impact of higher rates on equities." Likewise, JPMorgan equity analysts wrote in a note yesterday that "investors are nervous with respect to inflation and bond yield moves." The bottom line: After years when the AI trade seemed to be the only thing investors cared about, bonds are making a play for attention. What to watch: American household portfolios are packed to the gills with stocks, which could make a downturn a painful event. Stocks accounted for a record 48% of U.S. household financial assets in the second quarter, according to the Federal Reserve. That's roughly 10 percentage points above the high-water mark set during the peak of the dot-com tech boom in early 2000. What's next: The big event, of course, is the Federal Reserve's rate decision later today and Warsh's news conference. While the market is almost certain that the central bank will raise interest rates by a quarter point, a more important question for investors will be how much further they will go from here. That's not completely under the control of the Fed. "If we do have higher and higher oil prices, or let's say a longer and longer conflict," Ralph Axel, interest rate strategist at Bank of America, tells Axios, "central banks will hike more and more." A MESSAGE FROM AXIOS Simplify: Do 50% more with 50% less With AI upending work and life, Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen & Roy Schwartz, the bestselling authors of "Smart Brevity" offer a one-stop survival guide to dramatically improving your life, work and happiness. The idea: Toxic complexity clogs our inboxes and calendars. We can do more, but first we need to simplify. Get your copy. 2. Rise in yields takes some shine off stocks By Matt Phillips Data: FactSet, Axios analysis; Chart Axios/Matt Phillips The recent surge in bond yields is keeping the pressure on the premium investors earn for taking their chances with stocks rather than bonds. Why it matters: The skimpiness of the slab of extra returns the market typically offers stock market investors — which is known as the equity risk premium — raises the prospect that, at some point, investors decide they're just not being paid enough to expose themselves to the vagaries of equities. Reality check: The equity risk premium can't be observed directly, and there are a few different versions of it. The proxy we're using above is sometimes called the "yield gap." It takes the earnings yield on the S&P 500 (roughly 5.2%) and subtracts the yield on the inflation-adjusted 10-year Treasury note (2.60%). What they're saying: In a note published last week, analysts at JPMorgan suggested that the low levels of equity risk premiums we're currently seeing typically coincide with a period when stocks are more sensitive to moves in Treasury yields. "This greater sensitivity to bond yields, particularly in the event real rates drift higher fr

The Milk Road Macro Index flips risk off. 🥛 Fair warning ⚠️ The Milk Road Macro Index flips risk off. John Gillen GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that once a week switches from talking about things like where to find the next Bike Tyson to dishing out streamlined macro alpha. Here’s what we’ve got for you today: ✍️ Hold on to your butts. ✍️ What does this m ean for crypto? 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Raoul Pal: This Is the Setup Investors Wait Decades For . 🍪 In-kind redemptions and voting rights are coming for tokenized stocks on Robinhood. Nexo is a premier digital asset platform that helps clients build, manage, and preserve their wealth. Get started with Nexo today. Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko. HOLD ON TO YOUR BUTTS This week’s Fed FOMC rate decision was expected to be the "fulcrum" that the markets would hinge on. A hold would continue momentum, a hike would slow momentum. Instead, that market momentum was shut down on Monday before the Fed moved at all. Dario Amodei's AI capability essay triggered a semiconductor-led rout that pushed market momentum from -0.48 to -0.61 and drove the headline allocation posture from -0.74 to -0.86. Source: Milk Road Macro Index The posture is now firmly in RISK OFF, and not just barely through the line. The 0.36 gap to get back to RISK ON and the 0.12 gap back to CAUTION are both wider than anything a single session of stabilization can close. The economy and the market pillars are notably pulling against each other. The market pillar has deteriorated sharply, with financial conditions collapsing from +0.20 to +0.07 as the VIX jumped and growth impulses slid to -0.69. Copper weakness and the persistent Strait of Hormuz freight disruption also contributed to the drop on the market side. Meanwhile, the economy pillar's macro buffer holds full at +0.50, and stress stays benign at +0.06 because the framework's inflation direction measure is still negative over six months even as each monthly print runs hot. I know that sounds confusing, but that’s where we are with inflation these days. With hike odds now above 85%, up from roughly 56% ten days ago, the September 16 announcement no longer determines whether the Milk Road Macro Index slips into RISK OFF, but it might help determine how deep into RISK OFF the index goes and how long it stays there. A hold with credible forward guidance is the minimum condition to arrest the breadth and financial conditions decay and begin rebuilding toward CAUTION. A hike into a GDPNow reading of +1.17% would push both breadth and financial conditions lower with no cushion remaining. If a third consecutive 0.3% monthly core Consumer Price Index print follows in October, the six-month inflation direction would finally start turning upward, which would not be good. That sequence could drag stress off the floor and erode the economy pillar's only remaining support for the posture. ONE ACCOUNT FOR ALL YOUR CRYPTO NEEDS Crypto is still a weirdly fragmented experience. One app to buy. Another to earn yield. A third to borrow against your stack. But Nexo is now bringing it all under one roof: Trade, Earn, and Borrow. Nexo is a premier digital asset platform that helps clients build, manage, and preserve their wealth. Here's what makes them worth trusting: Official Crypto Partner of Tennis Australia First Digital Asset Partner of the Audi Revolut Formula 1 Team Operating since 2018 $7B+ in AUM SOC 2 & SOC 3 certified 24/7 client care Get started with Nexo today. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR CRYPTO? Well, it depends. You could take some risk off the table and watch for a pullback. It seems like we might be heading into a period where the market is weak and waiting. There’s so much uncertainty right now. The Fed. The Iran conflict. The midterms. The Clarity Act. I think it makes sense to get defensive and get into CASH. However, personally, I think that a lot of these things are short-term headwinds that may or may not actually hold the market down for a bit. The longer term view on the market and on crypto specifically, I think, looks very strong. My strategy for the moment is going to just be to HODL through all of this noise. I might have to stomach some volatility. I might miss some dips. But I think the overall bear market lows for crypto are behind us now, and my bias is that eventually these macro factors will pass, and the bull market will come back to crypto. If you want to see exactly how I’m positioned, you can join Milk Road PRO today for just a buck. That said, the way I play this does not have to be the way that you play it. Come up with a strategy that makes sense for you and your capital. And in the meantime, stay safe, stay educated, and stay bullish. LISTEN TO THIS MAN 🎙️ I want to give you a heads up that today’s podcast is with the legendary Raoul Pal of Real Vision. We spent almost an hour talking about why crypto has struggled this year, what needs to happen for it to finally move, and why he thinks crypto will become the financial infrastructure for the entire AI economy. After I interviewed Raoul, I actually sat down with LG and Kyle to record a bonus episode of Milk Road PRO After Hours , to give my personal thoughts on Raoul's investment thesis and how investors could express that in their portfolios. Especially on a day like today, where the market is a major decision point, I think it's important to take a long term view. You can see that right here for just $1 . BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪 Free seminar on blockchain and private markets. Our PRO analyst, Martin, is joining a live webinar to discuss where VC money is flowing. Register for free here .* In-kind redemptions and voting rights are coming for tokenized stocks on Robinhood. Permissionless prediction markets are exploding on Hyperliquid. Balancer : One of the OG Ethereum AMM’s is winding down. *this is sponsored content. Get started with Nexo today. RATE TODAY’S EDITION What'd you think of today's edition? 🥛🥛🥛🥛🥛 F**ki

Plus: JPMorgan dismisses flat talk | Tuesday, September 15, 2026 Axios Closer By Nathan Bomey · Sep 15, 2026 Tuesday ✅. Today's newsletter is 792 words, a 3-minute read. 📉 The dashboard: The S&P 500 closed down 0.5%, its sixth negative day in the past seven sessions. 10-year Treasury yields are at 5.01%. 🥶 Today's stock spotlight: Dave and Buster's Entertainment (-19%) plunged after the chain's earnings report showed its prolonged slump continued. 1 big thing: Crypto's lack of clarity By Pete Gannon Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios Clarity's fate is now far from clear. Crypto's long-sought market structure legislation failed to advance in a key Senate procedural vote today, a major setback for the bill and the industry that had made it its top policy goal. Why it matters: The bill would create a new federal regulatory framework for the $2.3 trillion industry, but it's faced growing opposition from Democrats due to President Trump's investments in the sector. 🗳️ The Senate vote this afternoon was 49-50, with multiple Republicans — including Sens. Susan Collins, Josh Hawley and Jerry Moran — voting no. It required 60 votes to advance. The big picture: The market structure legislation would create durable rules for how crypto functions in the U.S. financial system, replacing years of regulatory uncertainty around how digital assets can be issued, traded and sold to investors. 🥊 Friction point: Trump has pushed for the bill's passage, characterizing himself before the last presidential election as the crypto industry's biggest champion. But his personal business interests in the sector have sparked the fiercest opposition to the bill from Democrats, throwing Clarity's ultimate fate in the balance. Chief among many Democrats' concerns is that the bill's ethics restrictions are inadequate to prevent the kind of dealings Trump has engaged in since his election. 📉 The impact: The price of bitcoin has slipped 3.9% over 24 hours, to under $76,000. Crypto-linked stocks fell even harder, with Coinbase closing down over 10%, Robinhood over 3%, and bitcoin treasury company Strategy slipping 5.4%. What's next: While Clarity isn't officially dead, it could face an even more hostile Senate after the midterm elections. Go deeper 2. JPMorgan dismisses "flat" talk Data: Financial Modeling Prep ; Chart: Pete Gannon/Axios Excuse me , what's this talk of flat? A day after Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan predicted trading revenue to come in flat for Q3 against last year, JPMorgan provided a whole different forecast, Axios' Pete Gannon writes . 📈 By the numbers: JPMorgan expects its own Q3 number to come in higher by a "mid-to-high teens" percentage year over year, per co-president Doug Petno today from the same Barclays conference where Moynihan spoke yesterday. Petno cited broad-based strength at JPMorgan across equities and fixed income, currencies and commodities. The impact: JPMorgan shares jumped on the comment, erasing earlier losses and closing up 0.7%. Reality check: Though Moynihan's "flat" comment yesterday triggered a sell-off in bank stocks, he also said this year's period would be "one of the better third quarters we ever had" — the flat quarter a result of a tough comparison. 3. Other happenings Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Stock: Getty Images 🍪 Altera, a chipmaker backed by Intel and Silver Lake, filed confidentially for an IPO. ( Axios Pro ) 🚔 Two former Robinhood employees face federal fraud charges after prosecutors accused them of using nonpublic information to trade on perpetual futures linked to crypto on the exchange Hyperliquid. ( Bloomberg ) 🛑 The Kennedy Center's board voted to close the performing arts center's main building for a renovation project championed by President Trump after a federal judge again ruled the center could not put his name on the building. ( Axios ) A MESSAGE FROM AXIOS Everything you need to simplify "Simplify," a new book by the co-founders of Axios, is a step-by-step playbook for spending your time on what makes you perform and feel your best. The takeaway: Learn the Confront, Delete, Amplify framework used by the world's most effective leaders to cut complexity and reclaim focus. Grab a copy today. 4. 🎥 "Musk" doc arriving soon Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney. Photo: Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty Images A four-hour documentary on Elon Musk is barreling toward the big screen after making its North American debut last night at the Toronto Film Festival. Alex Gibney's buzzy film, "Musk," has moved up its official theatrical debut by a week: It will now open in New York and Los Angeles on Oct. 9 before hitting most major cities on Oct. 16, according to the Hollywood Reporter . 🎬 State of play: The 3-hour-45-minute film — which has a 10-minute intermission — covers Musk's early entrepreneurial career through his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency in 2025. "Gibney pulls no punches, neither in the documentary nor in interviews about it, in which he's called Musk's power and influence 'extremely dangerous to world democracy,'" the Washington Post notes . The other side: The world's richest person ripped the documentary last week, saying the filmmaker "has ZERO integrity" and is a "Horrible human." The bottom line: Reports suggest the film doesn't break much new ground but instead weaves together key aspects of Musk's career and personal life for a revealing portrait of how he wields power. A MESSAGE FROM AXIOS Ready to simplify? "Simplify: Do 50% more with 50% less" is a toolkit for work in the AI era, from the authors of "Smart Brevity." It's built on a three-step framework: Confront the complexity. Delete what's draining energy. Amplify what works best. Order your copy. Why stop here? Let's go Pro. Axios Pro Deals helps you get smarter and faster on the deals, opportunities, and investments that matter most. Get started today . Follow Axios across:

Decentralization might make AI unstoppable Byron Gilliam “Free scientific inquiry? The first adjective is redundant.” — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged AI without the data center Blockchains, often accused of being a solution in search of a problem, may have found a big problem to solve: the centralization of AI. As problems go, it’s been a theoretical one so far. Consumers of AI are currently overrun with free chatbots and open-source models to choose from. But as the topic of AI safety has now burst into the mainstream, it seems increasingly likely that the big labs that provide us with these chatbots and models will soon be regulated — perhaps in a way that leaves only a handful of government-approved providers able to build any new ones. That dystopian prospect has inspired a call to action among techno-libertarians and AI accelerationists: “The only possible resistance is to build decentralized, permissionless, and sovereign AI,” the pseudonymous Beff Jezos said on X. Replace “AI” with “money” and it’s exactly what crypto accelerationists have been working on for the last 15 years. The cause of decentralized AI even has a crypto-esque meme to rally around: a mash-up of the gun-rights motto “Come and take it” and the “Don’t tread on me” snake, now snaking out of a GPU on a revolutionary flag. Yes, it’s a little tinfoil-hat and backwoods-militia. The FBI is probably not going to seize the GPU out of your PlayStation or Xbox. But the feds did once make Americans surrender all their gold to the government, so who knows? Less conspiratorially, the government might regulate model development in a way that would make AI the exclusive domain of a handful of giant corporations. In the US, at least. Abroad, AI development would likely continue apace…and maybe underground, too, if it can be sufficiently decentralized. Some of this is already happening. Blockchain-based marketplaces like Akash offer permissionless access to compute, for example. Subnets on the Bittensor blockchain have been serving and fine-tuning AI models for a couple of years now. But the holy grail of decentralized AI is training frontier models — models that match the capabilities of Anthropic and OpenAI without the need for giant data centers. Is this possible? Most people who know about these things seem to say it isn’t, simply because of the amount of data that needs to be moved to train a model. A new model begins as a blueprint filled with billions of random numbers (called parameters). It’s then distributed across thousands of GPUs (or competing chips like TPUs), which perform enormous amounts of matrix math to predict what token is likely to come next given the tokens that came before it. The GPUs compare those predictions with the actual next tokens in the training data, then calculate how the parameters should change to reduce the error. The GPUs communicate these error adjustments across the network, synchronizing their calculations to update the shared model. And then they do it again, a gazillion times — make a prediction, measure the error, adjust billions of numbers, repeat. This makes model training fundamentally a problem of reducing latency — which means packing enormous amounts of compute, memory, networking, and power into one giant data center. Decentralized model training is the exact opposite: training a model across scattered, unrelated resources, wherever they happen to be. A small fringe of researchers say it’s possible. If the bandwidth issue can be overcome. The GPUs, CPUs, and memory inside data centers are connected by thousands of miles of specialized copper and fiber-optic cabling. Decentralized hardware, by contrast, can only connect over the internet, which is something like 1,000 times slower. By one estimate , pushing a single training prompt through a medium-sized language model being trained in a data center takes roughly 0.18 seconds. Over the internet, by comparison, it could take three minutes . At that pace, it would take thousands of years to train our first permissionless frontier model, by which time most of us will be dead. (Depending on whether centralized AI decides to exterminate us or keep us alive forever.) In July, though, a group of open-source researchers at Pluralis.ai did it in just five weeks . Using a novel data-compression technique , Pluralis trained an 8.6-billion-parameter model on 330 geographically dispersed, consumer-grade computers connected by consumer-grade internet — in about the same time it takes Anthropic or OpenAI to train a model in a giant data center. Problem solved! In theory. In practice, even the most optimistic experts say there are still a lot of real-world obstacles to overcome. Responding to the Beff Jezos call to arms for sovereign AI, Pluralis founder Alexander Long explained that “we don't have it yet because it’s hugely technically challenging — it requires solving fundamental research problems around low-bandwidth training and a rewrite of most layers of the training stack.” Beyond bandwidth, which Pluralis says is not yet entirely solved, there are also the problems of heterogeneous and unreliable hardware, adversarial participants, and attracting resources. In other words, everything that crypto is good at! Neither crypto nor blockchains was used by Pluralis in building its decentralized model, but scaling its proof-of-concept training methods to real-world relevance would seem to require it. Crypto has spent 15 years studying the kinds of coordination problems and incentive structures that truly decentralized model training will inevitably encounter. A decentralized data center, so to speak, isn't going to be filled with altruistically donated GPUs, CPUs, and memory. Instead, contributions will have to be incentivized, with money, pseudo-money, or some form of equity (perhaps on a blockchain). And the incentives will attract nodes that are dishonest, malicious, sabotaging, cheating, and unreliable (as every blockchain does). Due to the techn