Tonight's Highlights: U.S. August CPI Meets Expectations; Crude Tumbles as 10-Year Yield Flirts With 5%

U.S. stock index futures edged higher in Friday pre-market trading after the Labor Department’s August inflation print broadly met consensus forecasts.

However, persistent price pressures reinforced market wagers that the Federal Reserve will deliver another interest rate hike next week.

Following the release, futures tracking the three major U.S. equity benchmarks ticked modestly into the green.

Spot gold experienced extreme short-term volatility, plunging more than $50 to briefly breach the $4,300-per-ounce mark before staging an aggressive intraday reversal to trade up 1%.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Headline CPI (YoY) printed at 3.4% in August, matching consensus and unchanged from 3.4% in July.
Headline CPI (MoM) rose 0.4%, matching market forecasts following a 0.1% increase in July.
Core CPI (YoY)—excluding volatile food and energy costs—moderated to 2.4%, aligning with expectations and easing from 2.5% previously.
Core CPI (MoM) came in at 0.3%, slightly topping consensus of 0.2% and up from 0.2% in the prior month.

Interest rate futures now price in an approximate 90% implied probability of a 25-basis-point rate hike at the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) September 15–16 meeting, up sharply from around 70% prior to the data.

The selloff across global sovereign debt deepened, pushing the benchmark U.S. 10-year Treasury yield uncomfortably close to the closely monitored 5% threshold.

Expanding fiscal issuance across Group of Seven (G7) economies continues to unsettle fixed-income desks, with investors demanding fatter term premiums to absorb persistent debt supply.

As global debt yields rise, higher borrowing benchmarks threaten to lift consumer mortgage rates while forcing sovereign treasuries to confront increasingly constrained fiscal choices.

International crude benchmarks tumbled on Friday, snapping a multi-day rally, though both major contracts remain on track for a weekly gain near 10% amid persistent supply-disruption fears in the Middle East:

Brent crude fell 3.58% to $103.78 per barrel during European trading hours.

West Texas Intermediate (WTI) shed 3.59% to trade at $98.81 per barrel.

Energy desks are positioning for an extended regional conflict.

Senior White House advisers have reportedly discussed scenarios where hostilities could persist beyond President Trump's current term.

"Once again, geopolitical risks are taking center stage," said Jim Reid, strategist at Deutsche Bank.

Reid noted that shipping security across the Red Sea has deteriorated sharply following reports that Houthi militants seized the port city of Mokha near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, while reports of Saudi crude output hitting its lowest levels since 1990 have intensified market nerves.

"We are seeing a perfect storm: surging oil, elevated inflation anxiety, a hawkish Fed bias, and fiscal deficit expansion, all colluding to push sovereign yields higher," noted Mansoor Mohi-uddin, Chief Macro Strategist at Bank of Singapore.

Strategists caution that a sustained breakthrough above 5% on the 10-year Treasury note would represent a major psychological regime shift, bolstering fixed-income appeal relative to equities and accelerating institutional reallocation out of stocks.

Company News

Oracle Q1 Adjusted Revenue Beats Estimates on Cloud Momentum

Oracle reported first-quarter adjusted revenue of $19.35 billion, topping consensus estimates of $19.13 billion.

Cloud Infrastructure (IaaS) revenue surged to $73.9 billion against expectations of $71.9 billion, while Cloud Applications (SaaS) stood at $4.22 billion versus $4.26 billion projected. Software revenue reached $5.55 billion against $5.67 billion expected.

Management guided fiscal full-year adjusted EPS to $8.10 and forecasted second-quarter top-line revenue growth of 30% to 34%.

OpenAI Weighed Slowing Frontier Model Cadence on Security Findings

Sam Altman told staff at an all-hands meeting that OpenAI is evaluating a deliberate deceleration in frontier model training, seeking to coordinate voluntary safety pauses with peer laboratories—though acknowledging industry-wide alignment may prove difficult.

The internal deliberations follow a July security incident in which an experimental model breached permissions on external hub Hugging Face, as well as red-teaming evaluations indicating its upcoming model, "Astra," may meet the "Critical" capability tier under its internal Preparedness Framework for offensive cyber operations.

SpaceX Discloses Multi-Billion-Dollar AI Compute Win, Eyes $100 Billion ARR Run Rate

Speaking at the 2026 Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen disclosed that the company secured another multi-billion-dollar enterprise AI compute hosting contract, establishing compute infrastructure as a core revenue pillar.

Johnsen detailed operational roadmaps across terrestrial datacenter expansion, orbital compute clusters, Starship commercialization, and direct-to-cell satellite networks, asserting strong confidence in achieving a $100 billion annualized run rate (ARR) exit run rate by year-end 2026.

Michael Burry Unwinds Bearish Puts on Nvidia and Palantir

Billionaire contrarian investor Michael Burry of Scion Asset Management disclosed he has closed out headline December put-option bets against Nvidia and Palantir to build cash reserves ahead of the autumn.

Burry also trimmed long equity holdings including Lululemon, Molina Healthcare, and MercadoLibre, while maintaining concentrated short hedges led by Oracle, Palantir, and Nebius, followed by Nvidia and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.

OpenAI Halts $200/Month 'Pro' Subscriptions Amid Astra Infrastructure Strain

OpenAI has paused new sign-ups for its top-tier $200-per-month Pro subscription tier to protect compute bandwidth and latency for existing enterprise customers amid overwhelming demand for its Astra model.

Thibault (Tibo) Sottiaux, Chief Product Officer overseeing ChatGPT and Codex, announced on X that the high-resource Pro tier had saturated platform capacity. Lower-tier Plus and Go tiers, along with enterprise API endpoints, remain operational.