Good afternoon and welcome to Markets Desk.
Kevin Warsh broke his silence at Jackson Hole today, delivering his first keynote as Federal Reserve chairman with a pointed message: sixty-five months of elevated inflation is a signal nobody can ignore. Warsh has stepped back from the forward guidance playbook his predecessors relied on, leaving Wall Street to parse every word for clues on the rate path ahead.
Shifting to the consumer, Affirm surged after posting a strong outlook, but CEO Max Levchin flagged a real pressure point underneath the headline numbers. Gas nationally is sitting at four dollars and nine cents a gallon, last below three dollars back in early March, and Levchin says that sustained squeeze is visibly reshaping how American shoppers are allocating their spending.
And on the cyber front, OpenAI and several major tech companies issued a joint warning this week about the accelerating threat of AI-driven cyberattacks. The message was directed at both government and private organizations, urging coordinated defensive action before adversaries, who are already leveraging artificial intelligence offensively, outpace the institutions built to stop them.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
