At 8:30 this morning the Commerce Department will quietly revise away some of the inflation the Fed has just started raising rates to fight. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Wednesday, September 30, 2026.
A third straight session of drift. The S&P closed off about two tenths at 7,670, the Dow shed about 130 points, the Nasdaq was flat, and the ten-year went out at 5.25%, the highest since June 2007. The interesting prints were not in equities. Conference Board confidence fell almost seven points to 81.9, lowest since April 2014, twelve-month inflation expectations rose to 6.1%, and job openings fell to 7.08 million. Consumers who think prices are out of control, employers who have stopped advertising jobs. Oil fell about four and a half percent as Middle East exports recovered and Washington moved to release forty million barrels from the strategic reserve.
Now the part of today nobody will mention at the open. August personal income and outlays arrives alongside the annual update to the national accounts, revising 2021 through this year's first quarter, and the BEA is changing how it prices portfolio management, legal services and software. Goldman and JPMorgan both think core PCE comes down two or three tenths. The biggest piece is portfolio management fees. Your asset manager bills a percentage of assets, the market went up, the fee went up, and the BEA recorded that as a price increase paid by the consumer. Stocks rose, therefore inflation rose, therefore rates rose. Kevin Warsh called September's hike the removal of "a dose of accommodation." Some of the dose was a billing convention.
I read the BEA's preview of this update in June, on a Sunday, in Geneva, which tells you what my summer was. The detail that stayed with me: the software index had been blending genuinely different products, so a man buying a phone app and a firm licensing four hundred seats sat on the same line. The last time the ten-year sat here was 2007. I would like to say I took the right lesson from that year. I took that revisions matter, then traded the first print for eighteen years anyway.
Ahead: ADP at 8:15, second quarter GDP's third estimate and August PCE at 8:30, core expected up three tenths on the month and near 3.4% on the year, against a year being rewritten in the same release. Fed speakers after that. October is priced better than three in four for another hike, and I doubt one revised decimal moves it before lunch.
One of mine is losing. Keel Infrastructure (KEEL) is down about 13.5% since September 22, five sessions, against roughly 1% for the S&P over the same stretch. I bought grid capacity in Pennsylvania and Washington still waiting on a signed lease, and the market is pricing the wait rather than the capacity. It was a starter position, sized for this. No target, no defense.
Before the bell: gold $4,177.30 after a 1.4% bounce, WTI near $88.50, Bitcoin around $83,650, S&P futures up a tenth, the ten-year 5.24%. The crude quotes disagree by several dollars depending on whose screen you trust, which happens when part of the price is a war premium.
Whatever prints at 8:30, half the argument is about arithmetic from 2021.
See you tomorrow.
Salomon