• Warch’s hawkish tone on interest rates takes center stage

• Employment data is still soft

• Earnings remain robust

• Factor rotation in a picture

• Revenues are still accelerating higher

• Inflation metrics will likely start to merge (to the downside)

• Quick Hits

• Where did all the crypto money go?

• Chart Crime of the week

Despite it being another week of earnings following the blockbuster report from Nvidia last week, the central narrative involved interest rates and Fed policy.  Federal Reserve Chiarman Kevin Warsh stayed true to his recent tone during a speech at Jackson Hole.  The main takeaway is that he does not believe the recent softness in inflation has changed the underlying trend higher.  And that the Fed will act to reach its 2% inflation target.  But for all the overreactions in the media, the market took it in stride.  The “dollar debasement” trade took a breather (USD was stronger, gold and materials were down) as yields edged higher (10-year Treasury is about 0.12% higher, and the 2-year is about 0.15% higher).   But on the heels of the speech, more weakish economic data has emerged particularly in Employment.  While interest rates did not move much, equities found some relief.  The equity market has been known to do this at times…it assumes interest rates will do something that the bond market does not.  But in this case, we think it is likely more of a function of strong Earnings keeping the ball rolling (the latest blowout report came from Dell which gives the whole AI/sever/cloud ecosystem a boost).  It is worth adding that Software as a whole has not continued its boost from the Salesforce pop last week.  But certain names have…seeing the space become more bifurcated into winners and losers makes sense to us (some companies will surely do better at incorporating AI).