Gold keeps climbing and nobody on the equity desk seems to care

S&P 500 closed at 7,652.86, down 0.28% from Friday. Dow rose to 53,417.16. And gold, spot price at time of writing, is $4,679.89 a troy ounce.

So equities sit there doing almost nothing while the thing you buy when you think something is wrong is at levels that would have made front pages 2 years ago. Both of those can't be right, and you probably want to figure out which one is lying before Nvidia reports on Wednesday.

The 10-year Treasury yield is 4.69%. On 18 August the 30-year touched 5.33%, highest since 2007.

If you've got a mortgage renewal coming up, those 2 numbers set what you pay. So Bessent wants to do something about it. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is looking at the government's $950 billion cash balance, the money sitting in what's called the Treasury General Account, and he wants to use it to buy back bonds early. He already doubled buyback operations to $4 billion per round last week. Yields dropped for about a day, then walked right back up.

Now ask where that $950 billion came from. Tax receipts and borrowing. Spend it down and you have to borrow it back, probably at a higher rate, at a later auction. US government debt crossed $40 trillion. Annual interest alone hit $931 billion. So nothing gets paid off. You're just picking which month the bill shows up.

Brent crude fell nearly 4% to $90.76 a barrel.

And that's strange, right? Bessent is about to announce what the White House calls "economic D-Day" sanctions on Iran. Iran's top security official threatened to shut oil exports from the entire Gulf. But oil dropped anyway, because you've heard this before, and so has every trader with a screen. Threats, memos, a tanker attack on 18 August. Weeks of escalation. No deal, no full blockade.

About a fifth of the world's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz. A real closure sends crude well past $100 and you feel it at the pump inside a week. So does it close? China buys more Iranian crude than anyone. Forget the podium speech. Watch what Chinese refiners actually do with their orders.

July CPI came in at 3.4%. The Fed wants 2%. That gap is not closing.

And something got buried in the FOMC minutes last week. More officials backed a rate hike than the 3 who formally voted for one. Warsh hasn't raised rates. But the room is shifting under him, and he knows it, and you should know it too.

Warsh speaks at Jackson Hole later this week, his first address as chair. Does that speech open the door to a September hike? The words won't tell you. But if the 10-year yield jumps after he finishes, the bond market heard something you didn't.

50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods. Weekend talks collapsed. 5 days ago the White House said it had a deal.

Gone.

Canadian lumber, aluminium, energy. You pay that 50%, not Canada, and finding other suppliers takes months while the price hit lands right now. Neither side has scheduled new talks. So tariffs push your costs up at exactly the moment the Fed needs them going down, and if nothing gets rescheduled before September the next inflation print could carry the first visible tariff damage.

Nasdaq closed at 25,980.19, down 0.77% from Friday. Alibaba is selling $10.2 billion of new shares in Hong Kong for its AI push, one of the biggest stock sales in Asia this year. Now a company doesn't sell $10 billion of its own stock because it thinks the price is going higher. It sells because it thinks the price is good enough right now.

And then Sam Altman over the weekend said AI's payoff will take longer than people expect. His phrase: "We've not had the iPhone moment." Can you name the AI product that changed your daily life the way the iPhone did? Altman can't either.

But the spending assumes it already happened. Nvidia reports Wednesday. JPMorgan says AI stocks could trigger a broader pullback. And large investors trimmed semiconductor holdings last quarter even as prices climbed, which is the kind of gap that tends to close in one direction or the other, usually fast.

Spot gold $4,679.89, up from a previous close of $4,623.69. Spot silver $69.56, previous close $69.19. Spot copper $6.62 per pound.

The VIX, which measures how nervous stock traders are, closed at 15.85. Calm. But gold doesn't go to $4,679 when things are calm. So somebody with real money is buying protection, and you should probably ask yourself what they see that the equity market doesn't.

PDD Holdings reported Q3 revenue of $16.5 billion, missing the $16.9 billion estimate by 2.4%. Earnings per share beat at $2.85 against $2.76 expected, so costs are tighter, but the top line is what's slowing.

Napco Security beat both lines wide. Revenue $56 million versus $53 million estimated, earnings per share $0.50 against $0.39 expected. Gross margin hit 61.3%, up nearly 5 points in a year. That's the kind of quarter where you don't really need to say much else.

Stanmore Resources missed revenue by 30.9%, bringing in $978 million against $1.4 billion. Lost more per share than expected. And Rural Funds Group came in soft at $53 million revenue, guiding flat on cash earnings for the full year.

Nvidia reports Wednesday. Warsh speaks at Jackson Hole later this week. Friday brings a fresh inflation reading. And if no new US-Canada talks get scheduled before September, you could see the first tariff effect land in the next inflation print, right before the Fed decides on rates.

Issue compiled from the Monday, 24 August 2026 desk notes. Page published Friday, 25 September 2026. Metal prices are spot at the time of writing. Figures come from the sources set out in the editorial standards. Corrections: [email protected].

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