News and my thoughts from the past week (28Sep2026)
Benson's selected items (drafted from his inputs, his fact-check notes applied):
1. Weather and natural disasters across Asia. Typhoon Dujuan swept Japan's Kanto region around 21–23 September, bringing record rainfall, landslides and flooding with a rising death toll, and another storm was intensifying near Okinawa by week's end. Vietnam is still recovering from heavy rain and flooding across its northern and north-central provinces from mid-September, with homes inundated and crops damaged. In Thailand, all 50 Bangkok districts were declared disaster areas after severe rainfall, school closures and disruption to government travel — continued rain raises the risk of worse. In the Pacific, Hurricane Polo is real but its near-term threat is Mexico and Baja California Sur, with surf and rip-current risks extending further north; claims of compounded California coastal damage should be softened unless stronger evidence emerges. For investors, the thread connecting these is not any single storm but the compounding: food, freight and insurance costs in an El Niño year.
2. Ukraine–Russia: the grinding backdrop to energy. Peace-talk efforts remain protracted with no clear breakthrough, and Ukraine's continuing strikes on Russian oil-refining infrastructure are contributing to fuel tightness and export pressure. These are ongoing developments rather than isolated recent events — but they are part of why diesel and crude stay elevated, and why central banks from Oslo to Sydney keep citing energy in their statements.
3. The US midterms approach. With the elections only weeks away, late-September polling shows President Trump's approval running weak, and Republicans are openly concerned about losing the House and possibly the Senate. The impeachment framing deserves precision: the talk of impeachment arises if Democrats take the House — not the other way round. For markets, the nearer question is simpler: a White House facing hostile polling has every incentive to jawbone fuel prices down, which puts items like the Exxon refinery outage in a political spotlight.
4. Artificial intelligence: the control question. Concerns about slowing or better controlling frontier-model development are credible and growing; how US restraint might affect developers in Asia remains genuinely uncertain. One caution in wording: claims that companies cannot control their models go beyond the evidence — the honest statement is that the debate about control is unresolved. Xi's call in Washington this week to keep AI under human control lands in exactly this conversation.
Alternates from the shortlist
1. 📷 The 30-year Treasury yield hits 5.51%. The long bond has climbed almost uninterrupted from ~4.85% in July to 5.514% — the relentless, unglamorous force underneath everything else this week. (TradingView chart, US30Y daily)
2. 📷 *A record share of S&P 500 stocks now move against the index.* The proportion of constituents with negative beta is the highest in history — individual stocks doing the opposite of the market at a record rate. Correlation breakdowns like this often appear near crowded positioning. - Barchart, via X
US 30-year Treasury yield, daily (TradingView, via Benson)
3. 📷 A diesel supply shock inside an oil shock. Exxon Mobil has shut one of the largest diesel refineries in the Midwest (~11 million gallons of gasoline and diesel a day) on outage issues, just as diesel prices are up nearly 90% this year and the US enters peak demand season; $7.00/gallon is now being discussed. - X user The Kobeissi Letter
4. 📷 The political cost of US$98 petrol. President Trump posted that "gas prices were much higher under Biden than under TRUMP" — drawing the reply from X user Wendy Patterson that the promised 50% deficit reduction, lower inflation, sub-$2 petrol and $21 trillion of investment have not materialised. Meanwhile Gallup finds perceived corruption in the US government at a record 89%. Watch the approval-rating-to-policy pipeline as fuel bites. - Real America's Voice / Truth Social via X; Gallup
Truth Social post (Real America's Voice, via Benson)
Perceived corruption in US government (Gallup, via Benson)
5. 📷 Data-centre debt is repricing. The RPLDCI 6.581% senior secured bonds due 2049 (the "Project Beignet" data-centre financing) have slid from ~110 last October to ~94.8, with the slide accelerating since July. Equity markets are celebrating AI capex; the bond market is quietly charging more for it. - bond price chart via X
RPLDCI 6.581% due 2049 'Project Beignet' bond price (via Benson)
6. 📷 The "Cairn" hacking campaign, mapped. Between 10–15 September, up to 25 parallel intrusion campaigns ran against mostly US e-commerce and retail targets — card skimmers deployed, data exfiltrated, admin panels seized. The digital front of this conflict is hitting small retailers, not just governments. - threat research chart, 10–15 September 2026
7. Trump–Xi in Washington. The two presidents met on Thursday 24 September; Xinhua reported mutual support for hosting APEC and the G20, talk of "new trade arrangements" described as good news, and a call from Xi to keep AI under human control. [Newsquawk, 24 September]
8. The re-tightening club grows. Norges Bank raised its policy rate 25 bp to 4.50% on 23 September, citing low Strait of Hormuz shipping, Red Sea attacks and El Niño-driven rises in food and energy futures — and flagged readiness to go further. The Riksbank held at 1.75% but warned inflation is expected to rise; the SNB held at 0%. After the Fed's rise the prior week, the direction of global policy is no longer in much doubt. Norges Bank (https://www.norges-bank.no/en/topics/monetary-policy/Monetary-policy-meetings/2026/september-2026/), Central Banking (https://www.centralbanking.com/central-banks/monetary-policy/monetary-policy-decisions/7977033/switzerland-sweden-and-hungary-hold-rates-norway-hikes)
9. Costco's steady quarter — with a footnote. Q4 revenue of US$95.72B and GAAP EPS of US$6.75 beat expectations, but US$0.15 of that EPS was a one-off IEEPA tariff refund; comparable sales rose 9.4% (6.7% adjusted) and digital grew 19.5%. ⚠️ Sources differ on the revenue consensus (US$95.0B vs US$96.76B), which flips the headline between "beat" and "narrow miss".
10. Oil keeps easing despite the headlines. Crude fell for four straight sessions into Monday 21 September (WTI ~US$98, Brent ~US$102) even as Norges Bank cited Hormuz and Red Sea disruption in its rationale for hiking — though the Exxon refinery shutdown (item 3) may change that.
My Investing Muse (28Sep2026)
11. When a beat is not quite a beat — Costco's US$0.15 tariff refund inside a US$0.21 EPS beat raises a question worth sitting with: how much of this earnings season is operating performance, and how much is accounting weather? Tariff refunds, one-off credits, buyback-flattered EPS. What would earnings look like stripped to the boring core?
12. The central-bank pincer — the Fed has raised, Norway has raised, Sydney may follow on Tuesday, and oil is still near US$100. We spent three years waiting for cheaper money; the more interesting question now is what expensive money does — slowly, then suddenly — to leveraged balance sheets, commercial property, and the consumer's appetite for US$98 petrol.
13. Fear at the highs — the Fear & Greed Index sits at 37 while the S&P closes 1% below its record. When everyone is braced for the fall, who is left to sell? Or is the fear simply early?
Financial Strategy and Outlook
Let us close with the principles that keep us steady regardless of what the week brings. Spend within our means. Invest only what we can afford to lose. Avoid leverage, especially with rates rising and volatility returning. Keep a watchlist, buy quality at sensible prices, diversify across sectors and geographies, and let position sizing — not conviction — carry the risk. Review, rebalance, and never let a single week's headlines rewrite a long-term plan.
Wishing everyone a successful week ahead.
@TigerStars $MU$ $NKE$ $SPY$ #HigherForLonger
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