A TON OF THINGS HAPPENED IN THE STOCK MARKET TODAY. Here's a full recap: 1. The Clarity Act $BTC $ETH failed to advance in the Senate on Sept. 15, with the motion to proceed falling short of the 60-vote threshold in a 49–50 vote. The last-minute Sept. 14 rewrite included 126 Democratic-requested changes, covering state AG enforcement of ethics rules, a Treasury “circuit breaker” on stablecoin rewards if banks see deposit flight, and broader developer, miner, and validator safe harbors. The main sticking point was ethics language tied to official crypto holdings. The final text would have required covered officials and spouses to divest certain crypto interests or place them in a qualified blind trust, but critics argued it still left unresolved concerns around presidential crypto ventures. Markets sold the news, with Bitcoin down about 3% and $COIN Coinbase and $CRCL Circle falling roughly 8%-10% after the vote. 2. Elon Musk made several notable comments at the All-In Summit across $SPCX SpaceX, $TSLA Tesla, and AI safety. On Starship, he said the odds of catching the ship on the first try are “at least 50 or 60%,” and that he thinks it is “extremely likely” SpaceX achieves full reusability with rapid reflight in 2027. Asked why Tesla and SpaceX remain separate companies, Musk said, “Great question. Nobody's ever asked that one,” before adding, “Imagine what action one might take when there's so much close collaboration in so many areas.” On AI safety, Musk said the danger of AI is “very significant” and that when people from Anthropic and OpenAI say their models are dangerous, “we should believe them.” He also suggested that major AI competitors should test each other’s models, saying it would be better than companies “grading your own homework.” 3. Grab $GRAB will acquire a controlling 60% stake in Atome Financial for $1.49B in cash, expanding its consumer lending business across Southeast Asia. Atome operates BNPL, cash loans, cards, and digital lending across 5 markets, with a $1B gross loan portfolio and 25M cumulative transacted users. Grab expects the deal to help its Financial Services segment reach $500M in adjusted EBITDA and a $6B+ gross loan portfolio by 2028. The company also raised its 2028 group targets to $1.7B in adjusted EBITDA and 30%+ revenue CAGR from 2025 to 2028. Grab has also agreed to acquire the remaining 40% roughly two years after the first deal closes, with the valuation capped at $4.5B. 4. Global yields are breaking into decades-high territory: U.S. yields are at 2007 levels, UK yields at 1998 levels, Germany and France at 2008 levels, and Japan at 1996 levels. China is the major outlier, with government borrowing costs near record lows. Meanwhile, U.S. diesel prices hit a new record $6.26/gallon, up more than 80% in 9 months, leaving truck drivers paying nearly $3.00/gallon more than they were in January. California gas prices have also pushed above $6.00/gallon, adding another inflation shock as oil supply risks continue to build. 5. Officials from all 27 EU member states are set to meet in Brussels on Thursday to discuss international rules for advanced AI and receive a technical briefing on recent AI incidents, according to POLITICO. The discussions are expected to focus on global coordination through groups including the G7, G20, and United Nations. Europe already regulates advanced AI through its AI Act, with the European Commission beginning enforcement of parts of the law in August and the European AI Board coordinating implementation across member states. EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen has also called for greater international cooperation and regulatory interoperability to prevent fragmented AI rules across countries. 6. Another AI safety researcher has resigned from a frontier lab, this time from $GOOGL Google DeepMind, where he worked on AGI safety and alignment. He said he is “extremely concerned” by the default trajectory of AI and believes the technology “has the potential to kill us all” if current risks are not addressed. He pointed to the pace of progress since 2022, arguing that frontier systems have moved from being “amusingly useless” to agent swarms solving major math problems and allegedly escaping control in the Hugging Face incident. His core concern is that superintelligent systems could emerge within the next few years before alignment is solved, with capabilities advancing faster than researchers’ ability to ensure these systems actually do what humans want. He called for more coordination between AI companies, a slower pace of development, greater transparency into frontier labs, and more people working on catastrophic AI-risk mitigation. 7. The top 10 most active options today by contracts traded were $NVDA with 1.5M contracts, $TSLA with 1.5M contracts, $META with 868K contracts, $SPCX with 845K contracts, $AMZN with 710K contracts, $AAPL with 700K contracts, $INTC with 520K contracts, $MU with 512K contracts, $AMD with 387K contracts, and $PLTR with 361K contracts. 8. Saudi Arabia suspended oil loadings at Yanbu, its main Red Sea export port, after attacks on the East-West pipeline, according to Reuters. Yanbu typically exports up to 5M barrels/day, making the disruption another major pressure point for an already tight energy market. 9. OpenAI has held early talks with investors about a new private funding round that could value the company at roughly $1.2T, up from $852B in March, according to the Financial Times. The discussions were reportedly initiated by investors and remain at an early stage. OpenAI’s annualized revenue passed $40B last month after jumping about 20% following GPT-5.6, while Sam Altman has said an IPO is unlikely before 2027. The company raised $122B in March and spent $34B last year, underscoring both the scale of demand and the massive capital intensity behind the AI buildout. 10. Meta $META CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he does not think the AI industry needs a coordinated pause. His view is that each lab should slow down on its own when safety requires it, and that alignment will increasingly become a competitive advantage because people will not use AI agents they cannot trust. Meta already delayed Muse for several months to address safety and security issues without asking other labs to pause with it. Zuckerberg also said Meta has committed the significant majority of its compute to serving users rather than racing toward recursive AI self-improvement. 11. Long-term unemployment in the U.S. continued to rise in August, with the number of Americans unemployed for 27+ weeks jumping by 155,000 to 1.93M, the 4th-highest reading since December 2021. As a share of total unemployment, long-term unemployment rose 1.5 percentage points to 27.0%, the 3rd-highest level since December 2021. The metric has now been climbing for more than 3 years and is higher than in every recession except the 2008 Financial Crisis and the 2020 Pandemic. For context, this cycle’s low was 17.8% in February 2023. 12. Tomorrow will be one of the most important FOMC descisions all year. Kevin Warsh was asked in July 2025 whether his push for Fed rate cuts was influenced by the president who might appoint him to lead the central bank. His response: “There's a time for a bird to change his feathers, and it's with the times. It has nothing to do with this president.” Fast forward to today, and Wall Street has largely shifted toward expecting a Fed hike this week, driven by Warsh’s read on the economy and the way the macro backdrop has changed since he took over in May. The biggest shift has come from the Iran War, rising inflation pressure, and the AI investment boom. As of today, nearly every major bank on the Fed call sheet expects a September hike, with most looking for 50 bps, while Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and RBC expect 75 bps. Central bank watchers now expect not just one hike this week, but potentially another before year-end. WALL STREET IS THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH.
