The Week Ahead: August 24th to August 30th, 2026

Intelligence for the Considered Investor

The Week Ahead

24 to 30 August 2026

Good morning. Here is what we are watching this week.

Two set-piece events, Nvidia's results on Wednesday and Warsh's first Jackson Hole speech on Friday, will do more to set the autumn than anything since the spring.

The domestic calendar has fallen quiet at exactly the moment the stakes have risen. Britain's inflation and jobs numbers are both out, Parliament does not return until 1 September, and there is no first-tier UK release this week. Yet the gilt market has rarely been more exposed. The ten-year yield sits at 5.06 percent, still the highest in the Group of Seven, and this week it will be pushed almost entirely by forces beyond London's reach: the oil price, and what the Federal Reserve chair says in Wyoming on Friday. A government saddled with the developed world's most stressed bond market is, for the moment, a spectator to its own borrowing costs.

Last week's data gave the Treasury little comfort. Consumer price inflation rose to 2.9 percent in July, up from 2.6, as the higher energy cap and a firmer oil price fed through, while wage growth held at 3.5 percent and unemployment stayed at 4.9. It is not the runaway figure the hawks feared, but it points the wrong way into an autumn Budget already boxed in. Thames Water, meanwhile, festers. More than a hundred members of Parliament are now demanding special administration, and the disclosure of a million-pound signing-on payment for the company's finance chief, drawn from an emergency facility, has made the government's reluctance to act look worse with every passing week.

Everything the market has been waiting for arrives on Friday. Kevin Warsh gives his first Jackson Hole address as Federal Reserve chair, three weeks before the September rate meeting, and it is the closest thing to a decision the summer has offered. The debate has narrowed. After a jobs report that showed payrolls falling and an inflation print that came in mild, the case for a September hike has faded to around one chance in three, and a cut was never seriously on this hawkish Fed's table. A hold is now the base case. What Warsh can still do is signal whether the three colleagues who wanted higher rates in July have been talked down, or are simply biding their time.

He speaks with the oil price working against him. Crude has climbed again, up around 6 percent on the week to its strongest since late July, after Washington tightened its naval blockade of Iranian ports and the Treasury promised the harshest sanctions yet to isolate Tehran's economy. Iran's president has begun to talk of wanting the war ended, the first hint of an exit in weeks, but the barrel is not waiting for the diplomacy. A firmer oil price is the one thing that could revive the inflation problem just as the Federal Reserve persuades itself the danger has passed.

Before Warsh speaks, though, the market must first get through Wednesday. Nvidia reports that evening, the most important set of corporate numbers of the season, and the July reading of the Fed's preferred inflation gauge lands the same morning. Two of the three pillars holding this market up, the artificial-intelligence trade and the belief that inflation is beaten, are tested within hours of each other, a day before the man who commands the third takes the podium.

Two founding members of the European Union that share no border have spent August imposing border checks on one another. After more than sixty thousand people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in late July, the deadliest such surge on record, Giorgia Meloni's government suspended Schengen free movement with Spain on air and sea routes, arguing that the arrivals would make their way on to Italy. Madrid called it a breach of the Schengen code and answered with reciprocal checks on travellers from Italy, set to run into September.

The practical effect is slight, since few undocumented migrants fly between Rome and Madrid, and the gesture is largely political. The precedent is not. Schengen, the passport-free travel zone, is one of the Union's few tangible everyday achievements and a real economic asset, worth billions in frictionless trade and tourism. It has now been suspended, restored and contested piece by piece across the continent: by France over Italy, by Germany along its eastern border, and now between two Mediterranean neighbours quarrelling over a crisis neither can solve alone.

The lesson is in how these things come apart. No treaty has been repealed and no summit has voted Schengen down. It is simply being suspended, capital by capital, each government invoking an emergency and none willing to wait for Brussels to act. A union that cannot agree a common migration policy is discovering that its open borders were the policy, and that they close one national decree at a time.

South Korea: A Central Bank Split Down the Middle

The Bank of Korea decides on Thursday, and for once the economists are evenly divided, half expecting a hold and half a quarter-point rise to 3 percent. Having surprised the market with its first increase in more than three years in July, the Bank now weighs a rebounding won, which argues for patience, against strong growth and a hot housing market, which argue for more. Korea is a useful gauge because it faces early the choice the developed world is edging toward: whether an economy running warm, with asset prices climbing, needs higher rates even as global growth cools. The won and Korean shares will move sharply on which way it leans.

Hungary: Cutting as the Forint Slips

Hungary is travelling in the opposite direction. Its central bank is expected to cut on Tuesday, to 5.5 percent, a third consecutive reduction, even as the forint softens on the dovish signalling. It is a gamble familiar across central Europe: easing to support growth while trusting the currency not to punish you for it. With inflation still above target, the National Bank of Hungary is wagering that the growth risk outweighs the currency risk. That is a wager that holds until the day it abruptly does not.

United States

Personal Consumption Expenditures, Wednesday 26 August. The Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge, and the last major reading before Chair Warsh speaks. Core prices were running near 3.3 percent in June, hotter than the consumer price index and uncomfortably far from the 2 percent target. A firm number would make it awkward for Warsh to sound relaxed two days later. The second estimate of second-quarter growth and the July durable-goods orders arrive the same morning, but the price figure is what the Fed, and the market, will read first.

Germany

Ifo Business Climate, Monday 25 August. The most watched gauge of German corporate sentiment and a timely read on whether Europe's largest economy is steadying or still stalling under the weight of tariffs and soft external demand. Euro-area inflation for August follows on 1 September, just after this week, and matters more for the European Central Bank's 10 September meeting.

Japan

Tokyo Consumer Prices, Friday 28 August. The capital's inflation figure leads the national release by a few weeks and is the cleanest early read on whether price pressure is holding above target. Another firm number keeps alive the rate rise the market expects from the Bank of Japan in September.

One company now matters more to the market than any other, and it reports on Wednesday.

United States

Nvidia (NVDA). Second-quarter results after the close on Wednesday 26 August.

Revenue estimate: approximately 92 billion dollars, up more than a quarter on the quarter. Expected earnings per share: approximately 2.08 dollars. Sources: company guidance, consensus estimates.

Nvidia is the stock the entire artificial-intelligence trade rests on, and its results have become a market event in their own right. The headline will beat, as it almost always does; the number that matters is the guidance for the current quarter, because that is the company's own forecast of demand, and it tells the market whether the data-centre boom is still accelerating or merely large. Data-centre revenue near 80 billion dollars in a single quarter is the figure to find. When one company carries this much of an index, its outlook becomes everyone's.

Salesforce (CRM). Second-quarter results after the close on Wednesday 26 August.

The focus falls less on the quarter than on whether its artificial-intelligence products are converting into paid revenue. Sources: company guidance, consensus estimates.

If Nvidia sells the shovels, Salesforce is one of the firms meant to strike gold. The question hanging over enterprise software is whether the vast spending on artificial-intelligence capacity is turning into demand for the tools built on top of it, or whether corporate customers are still experimenting rather than paying. The take-up of Salesforce's newer products is the clearest read this week on whether the boom has reached the buyers.

Best Buy (BBY). Second-quarter results before the open on Thursday 27 August.

A read on discretionary consumer spending on electronics and big-ticket goods. Sources: company guidance, consensus estimates.

Best Buy is the consumer counterpoint to the week's technology fireworks. Electronics are the definition of a purchase that can wait, which makes the retailer a sensitive gauge of household confidence, and it reports days after Walmart warned of its slowest sales growth in years. If even the shop selling the devices the boom is built on sees the customer pulling back, that is a quieter signal, but a real one. Marvell and Dell report the same week for anyone tracking whether the artificial-intelligence demand runs the length of the supply chain.

Results, market reaction and the Clarmond view.

Home Depot  HD · Reported Tuesday 18 August

Up around 1 percent. Full-year guidance reaffirmed.

We flagged Home Depot as the most interest-rate-sensitive of the week's reports, the test of whether households still spend on their homes. They do, modestly: sales grew, comparable sales beat, and the company held its guidance. The big-ticket consumer is cautious but not retreating, which, in a week of worse news from its rivals, counts as reassurance.

Target  TGT · Reported Wednesday 19 August

Down around 2 percent. The earnings beat leaned on a one-off refund of tariffs worth almost a billion dollars.

We said the gap between Walmart and Target would be the revealing number, and Target gave the first warning. The headline earnings nearly doubled the estimate, but most of the excess came from a one-off tariff refund, not from selling more. Strip it out, and a discretionary retailer beat on sales yet was marked down, the market unconvinced the quality was real. A beat that has to be explained is not one that gets rewarded.

Walmart  WMT · Reported Thursday 20 August

−9%. A cautious full-year forecast and the slowest US sales growth in about six years.

Walmart was the week's real signal, and not a comforting one. The quarter beat, but the company guided the full year below expectations and reported the slowest growth in its American stores in roughly six years, and the shares fell nine percent. When the retailer that wins customers in hard times begins to sound cautious, the warning is not about Walmart. It is about the shopper, and it landed the same week the Federal Reserve began deciding how worried to be about the job market that pays them.

Deere, also previewed here, beat and nudged its guidance higher, calling 2026 the bottom of the farm-machinery cycle, a rare note of optimism in the week's results.

The late-summer lull ends this week in two acts. On Wednesday Nvidia reports and the Federal Reserve's favourite inflation gauge lands within hours of each other; on Friday Chair Warsh gives his first Jackson Hole address. Between them they test the two forces that have carried this market all year, the artificial-intelligence boom and the belief that inflation is beaten, and hand the verdict to the man who will set the price of money into the autumn. Seldom have so many of a market's load-bearing questions been asked in the same five days.

The mood going in is watchful. A September rate rise has slipped from likely to improbable after a weak jobs report, and a cut was never on this Fed's table, so a hold is the base case and Warsh's task is to confirm it or complicate it. The complication is oil, back above its July highs and feeding an inflation rate that has turned up again on both sides of the Atlantic. Last week's results carried their own warning: Walmart, the shop that thrives when money is tight, reported its slowest American growth in six years. The consumer the whole disinflation story rests on is tiring.

For all the data, the week reduces to an unusual concentration of risk. One company's guidance on Wednesday will move an index that has come to lean on it more heavily than on any single name in a generation, and one speech on Friday will move every bond market that takes its cue from the Federal Reserve. Diversification is meant to spare investors precisely this: a market whose direction turns on one chipmaker's forecast and one central banker's chosen words. This week it does not. Watch both, and resist the temptation to trade ahead of either.

With best wishes,
Chris and Mustafa at Clarmond
clarmond.co.uk