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Intelligence for the Considered Investor
The Clarmond Daily
Thursday, 13 August 2026 · Morning Edition · Est. MMXIV
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July inflation cooled to 3.4%, sparing the Federal Reserve a hard choice and letting the market exhale into the green. The reprieve is real; whether it lasts is the question.
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On This Day |
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13 August 1961 — 65 Years Ago Today
On this day in 1961, East Germany began the Berlin Wall — built overnight, without warning, to stop its own people fleeing west. It stood twenty-eight years. A state that must wall its citizens in has already lost the argument.
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Markets — Two Moves That Mattered |
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Equities — The Market Gets Its Reprieve
Cooler inflation, and stocks exhale
The number the market had been dreading came in mild. Consumer prices rose just 0.1% in July, and the annual rate of inflation actually slipped, to 3.4% from 3.5%. After a week of fretting that stubborn prices would force the Federal Reserve to raise rates even as the economy weakened, investors got the opposite: a reading tame enough to let the central bank sit on its hands. Shares rose — the S&P 500 up 0.3%, the Nasdaq more — helped by another wave of strong results from the AI names. For one day the stagflation nightmare receded, and the market remembered how to breathe. The relief was earned. It may also be brief.
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Corporate — The Neocloud Boom Roars
CoreWeave, Nebius and the AI gold rush
If you want to know whether the AI boom is real, look at the firms that rent out the computing power. This week a clutch of them reported, and the numbers were extraordinary. CoreWeave jumped almost 20% and Super Micro 9%. Nebius, a “neocloud” that hires out AI servers, soared more than 20% after reporting revenue up an astonishing 514% on the year. Demand for AI computing is not slowing; it is exploding. And yet a nagging question from yesterday lingers: much of this money is lent and arranged by the same handful of players. Revenue growing 500% is either the surest sign the boom is real, or the surest sign the wheel is spinning very fast indeed. This week, the market chose to believe the first.
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Risk Markets — Two Stories in Focus |
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I
The fastest-growing Ebola outbreak ever is losing its race
While the cameras follow the Gulf, the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak ever recorded is tearing through the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Confirmed cases have passed four thousand and deaths two thousand — half of them in the last three weeks alone — making this the second-largest outbreak in the disease’s history. Worse, it is caused by a strain, Bundibugyo, against which the existing Ebola vaccine and treatments are not certified: the tools that beat back past epidemics may not work on this one. The virus has already reached Uganda’s capital, Kampala. An epidemic with no oil price attached, and no Western casualties, struggles for the world’s attention even as it doubles. By the time it is impossible to ignore, it is usually too late to contain.
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II
The Strait of Hormuz is now all but closed
The numbers tell the story better than any communiqué. On Monday just eight ships passed through the Strait of Hormuz, against a pre-war average of about 120 — the world’s most important oil artery running at a fraction of its flow. With the tankers largely halted, the world is quietly drawing down the oil it had put in storage, a buffer that does not last forever. Iran has hardened in step: its new security chief now says the strait will stay shut until the United States ends the war and the blockade, releases Tehran’s frozen billions, and settles Gaza and Lebanon besides. That is not a shipping negotiation; it is a ransom for a whole region. And the meter, in barrels drawn from storage, runs the entire time.
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Political Diary — Two Stories in Focus |
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This Week · Tel Aviv
The vote that explains Netanyahu’s “no”
The reason Benjamin Netanyahu rejected an American peace plan for Gaza this week has come into sharper focus. Israel votes in the autumn, and a new poll suggests the bloc of parties opposed to the prime minister could win a Knesset majority — the largest single party being the new outfit of Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief who has turned against him. Netanyahu is, in short, fighting to keep his job, and his coalition of hardliners has no appetite for ending the war on any terms short of total victory. Seen from Washington, his refusal looks like obstinacy. Seen from his own polling, it looks like survival. For now, the two are the same thing.
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This Week · Malé
The Maldives, more than a postcard, boils over
Behind the honeymoon brochures, the Maldives is in political crisis. Night after night, crowds have filled the streets of the capital accusing President Mohamed Muizzu of hollowing out the country’s young democracy — muzzling the courts, leaning on the press and letting corruption run. The archipelago matters more than its size suggests: it sits astride some of the busiest shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean, and both India and China have spent years courting it. A backsliding Maldives is not merely a local tragedy; it is another small, strategically placed democracy sliding toward one-man rule while the great powers, eyeing the sea lanes, look away. The tourists rarely see the second island. It is the one where the politics happens.
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The Clarmond Take
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The Consensus
The inflation scare is over. Prices are cooling, the Fed can relax, and the path is clear for the rally to run.
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The Clarmond View
One good month is not an all-clear. Yes, headline inflation dipped to 3.4%, and the market treated it as a reprieve. But strip out the volatile items and core prices are still rising at 2.5% a year, comfortably above the Fed’s target and above where anyone wants them lodged. More to the point, this reading is a photograph of the past. It does not yet contain the oil now climbing as the Gulf’s shipping lanes seize up, and energy is the one price that leaks into everything else. The Federal Reserve has been handed a month’s grace, not a cure. The market has decided the inflation story is finished. Inflation, unhelpfully, has not been consulted.
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Popcorn News — The Absurd, The Unusual, The Human |
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A chewing gum that fights cancer
Among this month’s stranger medical advances is a humble one: a specially engineered chewing gum that, in trials, cut levels of the HPV virus by up to 93% and all but wiped out two bacteria linked to cancers of the head and neck. It is the sort of innovation that will never be glamorous — a medicated stick of gum — and might quietly spare a great deal of suffering. The most transformative medicine is often not the most dramatic. Sometimes it is the thing you chew on the bus, without a second thought.
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A cheaper path to clean hydrogen, hiding in steel
Green hydrogen — fuel made by splitting water with clean electricity — has long been held back by cost, partly because the machines that make it need expensive titanium parts to survive the corrosion. Now scientists have engineered a stainless steel tough enough for the job at a fraction of the price. It is not the kind of discovery that trends. But the energy transition will be won or lost on exactly this sort of unglamorous engineering: not one miracle, but a thousand small savings that turn a good idea into an affordable one. Revolutions, in the end, are mostly plumbing.
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