☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours:
🌍Market Overview:
🔸 Scott Bessent told CNBC the Treasury can expand its bond buyback beyond the initial $4 billion. The bond market ignored him inside a day, with 30-year yields marching back toward multi-decade peaks.
🔸 Broadcom is in talks with lenders to raise more than $60 billion of debt to buy AI chips and lease them to Anthropic and others. Add the roughly $30 billion junior tranche and the package reaches $100 billion.
🔸 US companies have spent a record $517 million on House and Senate races in 15 months, more than the $461 million spent across the whole 2024 cycle. Crypto, AI and betting firms are the new biggest donors.
🔸 S&P Global's flash US services PMI jumped to 56.8 in August from 54.6, lifting the composite to 56.0, its strongest since April 2022. Manufacturing eased to 53.2 against expectations of 53.9. Cuts drift further out.
🔸 Nevada regulators approved three permits on Thursday for Tesla, Uber and Waymo to run commercial robotaxis around Las Vegas, up to 8,000 vehicles over the next 12 months. Tesla's share of that is 5,000.
🔸 Ramp's spending data across 70,000 US businesses has Anthropic at nearly 44% of corporate AI budgets and OpenAI at nearly 40%. OpenAI lost that lead in May and is now growing faster again.
🪙Crypto Updates:
🔸 More than $3 billion was liquidated across the major exchanges, and $2.77 billion of it, 92%, was shorts. That is the most aggressive unwind of bearish positioning since FTX collapsed in November 2022.
🔸 Ripple is backing a credit fund that will lend RLUSD to fintech and payments companies through the XRP Ledger. Cicada has underwritten $860 million of credit, Clearpool $930 million since 2021.
🔸 Shinhan Asset Management signed a four-party deal with the Solana Foundation, Etherfuse and Orca to test a Korean won tokenized fund on Solana. Solana sizes the tokenized asset market at about $36 billion.
🔸 CFTC Chair Michael Selig has directed staff to start writing crypto market-structure rules under the agency's existing authorities, so the regulator can move if Congress never passes the Clarity Act.
🔸 Franklin Templeton won an SEC no-action letter on Aug. 12 that could place its $726 million tokenized BENJI money-market fund inside ordinary mutual funds and ETFs as soon as the fourth quarter.
🔸 X is weighing stablecoin payouts for creators, with Circle's USDC among the options under discussion. Its Original Content Rewards program replaces revenue sharing on Sept. 8.
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1August 21, 2026 6.4K 1
