Oil at 99 dollars drags the Dow down 628 points

Brent crude closed at $99.25 a barrel on Tuesday. Up 3.1% after Houthi rebels hit Saudi energy facilities.

The Dow fell 628 points to 52,786. S&P 500 down 0.6% to 7,674. Nasdaq off 0.3%. And Friday's consumer-price report sits 3 days out, with oil this close to $100 and the Fed meeting on September 17.

The 10-year Treasury yield, the interest rate the U.S. government pays to borrow for a decade, rose to 4.805%. If you carry a mortgage or a car loan that resets, your rate follows that number.

Britain sold £4.25 billion in long-dated bonds, about $5.75 billion, at the highest interest rate lenders have demanded since 1998. 1998. Germany's 10-year hit a 15-year high just last week. So borrowing costs are climbing for governments everywhere, and you pay for that through taxes or cuts or both.

The VIX, a gauge of how much turbulence stock traders expect, jumped 8.4% to 15.75.

$99.25. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel where roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes, is running about 60% below normal traffic. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned 27 Iranian airlines on Tuesday to squeeze Tehran. Sanctions add pressure. They don't reopen shipping lanes.

Every dollar higher feeds into your fuel bill, your grocery bill, and straight into Friday's inflation number. So can oil stay below $100 if the strait stays half shut?

Strong August payrolls already had a rate hike on the table. 162,000 jobs, roughly triple what forecasters expected.

Chair Warsh hinted at a hike in late August. Governor Barr said he'd back one if inflation doesn't ease. But Governor Waller broke with both and favours holding steady. So the vote depends on Friday's CPI.

And the Fed's own books are a mess. It made $12.7 billion last quarter, 3 straight quarters of profit, but it still owes itself $233 billion, a hole left over from pandemic-era bond buying when it loaded up on bonds paying almost nothing and now pays banks a much higher rate to park cash overnight. No money goes to the U.S. Treasury until that hole is filled. Best case, mid-2031.

If rates go higher the hole gets deeper. The very hike the Fed is considering makes its own balance sheet worse.

Canada started charging tariffs on $20 billion of American goods on Tuesday. Steel, aluminium, motorcycles, milk, clothing. Some items face 15%. Others 25%. A few categories carry 50%.

One former trade official called it a trade row, political noise with limited economic damage. But if Canada widens the list beyond $20 billion, it stops being a row. And if you buy anything made with American steel that gets finished in Canada, your costs go up either way.

The yen hit its strongest level against the dollar since February. If you borrowed cheap yen to invest where rates are higher, a strategy called a carry trade, you're losing money right now. A lot of big funds did exactly that for years.

Reports say Japan may be selling some of its huge U.S. Treasury holdings. Nobody has confirmed it with hard data from Japan's finance ministry. But if that selling is real, it puts pressure on the same bonds already moving against you. Watch the ministry data, not the rumours.

Gold spot sat at $4,350.03 at time of writing, down from a previous close of $4,423.02. You'd expect gold to rise when oil spikes and wars escalate. But higher yields pull money into bonds, and gold pays no interest. Silver spot was $65.42, down from $66.40. Copper $6.77 a pound.

Washington put $300 million into quantum computing for the first time under the Chips Act. $100 million each to Rigetti, D-Wave and Quantinuum. None is profitable. None has shipped a machine that beats a regular supercomputer on a real commercial task.

ServiceTitan reported Q2 results. Revenue hit $293 million, 2.4% above estimates. Net loss of $25 million, but shrinking.

Free cash flow margin, the cash left after running the business, swung from negative 3.6% last quarter to positive 17.7%. A 21.3-point swing in a single quarter. That's the line that tells you whether this company actually turns growth into cash.

Thursday brings the producer-price report, which often previews what Friday's consumer-price index will show. Friday's CPI for August is the last big number the Fed sees before its September 17 meeting. If that reading runs hot with Brent already at $99.25, you're looking at the first rate hike in years.

Issue compiled from the Tuesday, 8 September 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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