| |
|
Intelligence for the Considered Investor
The Clarmond Daily
Monday, 17 August 2026 · Morning Edition · Est. MMXIV
|
|
America's consumer is flinching and China cannot stop its prices falling. The world's two great spenders are pulling back at once — even as Wall Street, cheerfully, sits at another record high.
|
On This Day |
| |
17 August 1978 — 48 Years Ago Today
On this day in 1978, three Americans drifted a helium balloon into a French field and made the first Atlantic crossing by balloon — a feat a century of attempts had failed, often fatally, to achieve. They were aloft six days. Some frontiers fall not to force but to patience.
|
|
Markets — Two Moves That Mattered |
|
Equities — The Consumer Starts To Flinch
Retail sales fall as shares sit at records
The market spent last week celebrating cooler inflation. It spent far less time on the number that landed on Friday: American retail sales fell 0.6% in July, when a small rise had been expected. Coming so soon after a jobs report that showed the economy actually shedding work, it is the second warning light in a fortnight, both blinking the same colour. The consumer, who carries roughly two-thirds of the American economy, is beginning to pull in their horns. For now the market waves this away, because a softer economy means the Federal Reserve can cut rates, and shares closed the week near record highs, a third straight weekly gain. But there is a narrow line between an economy cooling enough to allow a rate cut and one cooling enough to need one. The data is drifting toward the wrong side of it.
|
|
|
Corporate — The Forum Becomes A Blue Chip
Reddit is joining the S&P 500
In a small sign of how the world turns, Reddit — the sprawling online forum where an army of amateur traders once banded together to torment Wall Street's short-sellers — is about to join the S&P 500, the index of corporate America's establishment. Its shares leapt more than 10% on the news. The company that hosted the meme-stock rebellion is now blue-chip enough to sit beside the banks and oil majors it once mocked. There is a lesson in it about how a market handles its insurgents. It does not defeat them. It lists them.
|
|
Risk Markets — Two Stories in Focus |
|
I
A 7.7 earthquake strikes Indonesia, and the ground keeps shaking
A powerful earthquake of magnitude 7.7 struck off the Indonesian island of Flores before dawn on Saturday, killing at least forty-seven people and injuring more than a hundred. Buildings folded and landslides swallowed roads across East Nusa Tenggara, one of the country's poorer provinces, and by nightfall more than two hundred aftershocks had rolled through, the strongest a serious quake in its own right. Indonesia sits on the most violent seam of the planet, the Ring of Fire, and has learned to live with the shaking as a fact of life. But familiarity is not safety. When the buildings are cheap and the warning short, a rich country's earthquake and a poor one's are the same event with very different funerals.
|
|
|
II
China cannot make its prices stop falling
While the West frets about inflation, the world's second economy has the opposite disease. China has now endured its tenth straight quarter of falling prices, a deflation that no amount of official cheer has been able to shift. Beneath the headline growth of 4.5% the rot is plain: property investment has collapsed by more than half from its peak, and youth unemployment sits close to 17%. Deflation sounds pleasant to anyone who has watched a supermarket bill climb, but it is the more dangerous ailment. When prices and wages fall together debts do not, and households wait for tomorrow's cheaper price rather than spend today. That is the trap Japan fell into for a generation. China, far larger and far more indebted, is now feeling for the edge of it.
|
Political Diary — Two Stories in Focus |
|
This Week · Jerusalem
Netanyahu, caught between Trump and his own voters
Benjamin Netanyahu is being pushed hard from two directions that pull opposite ways. From Washington, President Trump wants him to commit fully to the ceasefire his peace plan set out — a phased disarmament of Hamas alongside a partial Israeli withdrawal. From home, with an election due at the end of October, the prime minister needs his hard-right base to believe he has conceded nothing. His answer this week was a video message to Israeli voters carefully playing the American plan down, even as his forces quietly eased their strikes on Gaza. It is a familiar balancing act, and he is its great practitioner. But an election is the one audience that cannot be spun, only counted.
|
|
|
This Week · Moscow & Kyiv
Trump's other peace deal collapses, and the drones answer
President Trump has been selling himself as the man who ends wars. This week his Ukraine project fell apart. Talks with Vladimir Putin have stalled, Washington has put its sanctions back, and the markets that trade on such things now price the odds of a ceasefire this month at barely one in forty. The guns filled the silence at once. Ukraine sent some six hundred drones at Moscow overnight. Russia answered with ballistic missiles on Kyiv and even a book market. Most ominously of all, a NATO jet shot down a stray drone over Romania. A failed negotiation does not freeze a war in place. It hands the initiative back to the people with the missiles, and this one is now lapping at the alliance's own border.
|
|
|
The Clarmond Take
|
|
The Consensus
Weak data is good news. Soft jobs and soft sales mean the Federal Reserve cuts rates, and rate cuts are what keep the rally running.
|
|
|
The Clarmond View
That reflex has worked for most of a decade, and last week it worked again. But watch how the data is changing character. A month ago the worry was that prices were too high; now it is that demand is too weak. The economy has shed jobs and, on Friday, shed sales — two of the three legs a healthy expansion stands on wobbling at the same time. The market still reads every soft number as a nudge toward cheaper money, and cheers. There is a point, though, where the figures stop whispering that the Fed will cut and start saying that the customer has gone home. A rate cut can make borrowing cheaper. It cannot make an anxious household spend. The market is betting the Fed can mend what is coming. On this evidence, it may be the wrong tool for the break.
|
|
Popcorn News — The Absurd, The Unusual, The Human |
|
A single brain cell may be a computer in itself
We tend to picture a brain cell as a simple switch, on or off, with all the cleverness arising from the vast network they form together. New research complicates that flattering idea. A single neuron in the cortex, it turns out, can perform computations far richer than a mere on-or-off flip — something nearer to a small processor than a single transistor. If it holds, the mind is stranger than we thought: not one great computer built from simple parts, but a computer built from billions of smaller computers. You contain multitudes. So, it seems, does each of your cells.
|
|
|
The 236-million-year-old mother who changed everything
Palaeontologists studying the fossil of a cynodont — one of the shrew-like creatures from which every mammal is descended — believe it gave birth to live young some 236 million years ago, far earlier than anyone had supposed. The clues are quiet ones: a growth line laid down before birth, a birth canal built unusually wide. It is a small fossil with a very large implication. Long before the first dinosaur fell, one of our distant grandmothers was already doing the most mammalian thing there is — carrying her young within her, and delivering them alive into a dangerous world.
|
|
|
Please tell us what is working and what is not — just reply. |
| |
|
The Clarmond Daily is published by Clarmond Wealth Limited, 118a Kensington Church Street, London W8 4BH. Clarmond Wealth Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. The Clarmond Daily is provided for information and general interest purposes only and therefore does not constitute regulated activity. Nothing in this publication constitutes investment advice, a personal recommendation, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security, investment or financial instrument. The views expressed are those of the authors at the time of writing and are subject to change without notice. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. The value of investments and the income from them may fall as well as rise and you may not get back the amount originally invested. Clarmond Wealth Limited makes no representation or warranty as to the accuracy or completeness of the information contained herein and accepts no liability for any loss arising from its use. Produced and distributed in the United Kingdom and subject to English law.
You are receiving this communication because you are a contact of Clarmond Wealth Limited. If you no longer wish to receive it, please use the unsubscribe link below.
© Clarmond Wealth Limited. All rights reserved. Reproduction or distribution of this publication, in whole or in part, without prior written consent is prohibited.
|
|
