The S&P 500 (Index: SPX) fell a little under 0.7% during the trading week ending on Friday, 24 July 2026. The index ended the week at 7,408.70, which is 201.08 points (or 2.6%) below its all time record high of 7,609.78 from 2 June 2026.

The past week didn't see a single catalyst to weigh on stock prices, but rather three of them. Oil prices briefly shot up over $100 per barrel with the Iran war's disruption to oil shipping in the Middle East. The risk of higher inflation prompted the second catalyst of the specter of higher interest rates to rear its ugly head.

But the third catalyst was perhaps the most significant. Outsized capital expenditures by AI tech giants like Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL and GOOG) and speculated for firms like Meta Platforms sent their stock prices sharply lower from where they closed the previous week. That action pulled the S&P 500 lower overall thanks to their outsized shares of the total valuation of all the stocks within the market cap-weighted index.

Overall, the S&P 500's trajectory ticked down to toward the lower end of the redzone forecast range on the latest update of the alternative futures chart.

As we're reaching the end of the redzone forecast range, we find the level of the index is consistent with investors fixing their attention on either the current quarter of 2026-Q3 or the more distant future quarter of 2026-Q4. Investors have reason to focus on each of these quarters thanks to their status as quarters in which the Federal Reserve will most likely hike short term interest rates in the U.S. The CME Group's FedWatch Tool now projects two quarter point rate hikes in the months ahead. The first would occur after the Fed meets on 16 September (2026-Q3) and the second would take place on 9 December (2026-Q4). The FedWatch tool's projections are biased toward potential additional rate hikes in 2027 with the most likely timing in the first half of the year.

If, when, and by how much the Fed might change interest rates however will be affected by the random onset of new information. Here are the market moving headlines from the trading week ending on Friday, 24 July 2026:

Monday, 20 July 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US to hit Canada with 50% tariffs on wide range of goods
• New York issues moratorium on data centers
• Data center protests go national as backlash grows
• Oil reverses as Iranian comments interpreted as chance for fresh negotiations
• US pump prices cross $4 again on renewed fighting in the Middle East
• Why oil prices haven't gone crazy despite 5 months of US-Iran war
• Bigger bailout developing in China:
• China’s ‘national team’ buys shares worth $9bn to prop up market
• ECB minions relieved to see oil price surge isn't causing Eurozone wage growth, but still getting excited to hike interest rates:
• ECB survey sees moderating wage demands, selling price growth
• Markets price in two ECB rate hikes by early 2027 on inflation concerns
• Wall Street ends lower as oil prices rise, investors await big tech earnings
• Wall Street indexes fall, with Iran and earnings season in focus
• S&P 500 earnings season starts off with a bang as 88% of names top estimates
• Chipmakers head for big profit gains, but will it be enough?

Tuesday, 21 July 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Trump prepares fresh tariff barrage with 10% levies set to expire
• US imposes new 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian products
• Oil prices rise to five-week high on US-Iran attacks, Houthi blockade threat
• Asian refiners look to Suez Canal to move Saudi oil amid Houthi shipping threats
• Economists think Fed minions won't hike U.S. interest rates in 2026, but think there's a chance they will:
• Fed to hold rates this year despite high inflation, but economists cite high chances of a hike: Reuters poll
• Bigger trouble developing in China:
• China considers tighter export controls on AI models and chips, FT reports
• China's world-leading renewable megabases rely on coal-heavy transmission, report finds
• China's steel sector looks weaker than it is, reverse for iron ore
• ECB minions clamp down on Eurozone credit:
• Euro zone banks tighten credit access on war fears
• Dow gains nearly 400 points; S&P 500 snaps 3-day losing run as chip stocks rise
• U.S. stocks inch up after investors assess strong earnings, higher oil
• Wall St ends higher on chip stocks recovery; earnings in focus
• S&P 500 is 1.5% from ATH after nearly two months of sideways action

Wednesday, 22 July 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• OpenAI models went rogue during testing
• AI investment boom puts Big Tech's free cash flow under pressure
• US 30-year mortgage hits 11-month high, MBA says
• Oil climbs over 3% to near six-week high as conflict threatens key oil transit routes
• Trump vows to bomb Iran’s bridges, power plants if it shoots at ships in Hormuz Strait
• BOJ minions fear yen's decline will continue, standing by to hike interest rates to prop up Japan's currency:
• BOJ on alert to price risks that may lead to faster rate hikes, sources say
• Japan imports jump to record high on oil price surge, complicating BOJ policy
• Yen steadies near 40-year low on rate-hike bets, intervention talks
• U.S. Stocks Could Soon Have a Yen Problem
• ECB minions standing by to hike Eurozone interest rates later:
• ECB to pause rate hikes but signal that more may be needed
• Wall Street ends red as U.S. stocks struggle ahead of Tesla, Alphabet results
• Wall Street indexes dip with technology earnings, rising oil in focus

Thursday, 23 July 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• How the hunt for value sparked a US private-label revolution
• AI will not trigger employment collapse, staffing company Adecco Group says
• Oil prices rise for a fifth day as US-Iran hostilities threaten supply routes
• US oil refineries run at breakneck speeds as wars choke fuel supplies
• Fed minions keeping mum, including the hawkish ones who want to hike interest rates:
• Warsh's no-guidance approach confronts a hawkish world and hawkish Fed colleagues
• BOJ minions / Bigger trouble developing in Japan:
• BOJ to raise rates again by December as weak yen revives inflation risks: Reuters poll
• ECB minions worrying about rising oil prices again, but strangely choose to leave Eurozone interest rates unchanged if they really believe inflationary shock is coming:
• Oil price surge reignites inflation worries ahead of ECB meeting
• ECB Keeps Rates Unchanged (As Expected), Warns 'Full Energy Inflationary Shock Yet To Come'
• ECB minions also thinking about other things:
• ECB considering several options to mitigate losses, sources say
• ECB will discuss raising banks' minimum reserves, Lagarde says
• U.S. stocks end lower as oil reaches $100/bbl; investors assess tech results
• Wall St falls as tech earnings spark AI spending worries and oil hits $100
• Alphabet earnings takeaways: Q2 revenue beats, GOOGL stock sinks on 2026 capex hike
• Google burns through $6bn in cash as AI spending climbs again
• Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

Friday, 24 July 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Trump imposes forced labor tariffs, drawing protests from trading partners
• European Commission gives guarded welcome to new Trump tariffs
• Oil retreats from above $100, still set for weekly rise on Middle East escalation
• Oil tankers face attack on multiple fronts as fighting escalates in Red Sea, Hormuz and Black Sea
• US business activity perks up in July, helped by World Cup, but trend may not last, S&P Global says
• Fed minions being told by markets how to set interest rates:
• Fed Chairman Warsh faces cruel summer as bond yields spike
• BOJ minions live up to expectations as bigger trouble develops in Japan:
• BOJ likely to keep inflation warning but expect no big build-up in risks
• Japan June core inflation accelerates, stays below BOJ target
• Yen heads for biggest weekly drop since May despite Tokyo's support pledges
• US warns against excessive yen volatility, calls for BOJ rate hikes
• ECB minions get data indicating no changes in Eurozone inflation outlook:
• ECB survey shows broadly unchanged inflation outlook
• S&P 500 posts weekly loss while defensive sectors outperform
• U.S. stocks see a second week of losses as oil prices retreat from $100 level
• Nasdaq lags on angst over AI spending ahead of earnings reports
• Moody’s says ‘unprecedented’ AI spending threatens credit quality of Amazon, Meta, Alphabet and others

The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow tool's estimate of real GDP growth for the U.S. economy in the current quarter of 2026-Q2 was unchanged at +1.7%, with no updates in the past week.

Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bear scaring a bull with a stage presentation on 'WHY BULLS SHOULD BE SCARED' with three easels set up that say 'OIL PRICES', 'RATE HIKES' and 'AI CAPEX COSTS'". The tag indicating the image was "AI generated" is something new, but hopefully no surprise to any of our readers who read all our articles down to this bottom line!

Keeping your digital accounts secure is a never ending arms race.

Computing technology increases in capability every year. For hackers with access to the latest, greatest computers and code, it is easier than ever for them to run through tens of millions of combinations of characters to discover your passwords.

What you thought might be a safe and secure password a few years ago may now be vulnerable to being cracked. And if your password can be easily cracked, how safe are your accounts?

Hive Systems has updated their "Time It Takes a Hacker to Brute Force Your Password" infographic for 2026. Here is the table showing how long a competent hacker would take to find passwords made up of various lengths and combinations of characters:

How easy it is for a hacker to crack your password depends upon how long it is and what combinations of numbers, lower case letters, upper case letters, and special characters you use in your password. As you can see in the chart, in 2026, if you're using eight digit numbers as your password, you might as well not even bother having one....

Is it time to send the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey off to the not-so-useful data junk heap?

The answer to this question hinges on whether the survey is really useful or not. Useful data will quantify information that tells us something useful about what it purports to measure. In the case of the University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment Survey, it should provide accurate information about how a sampling of American consumers surveyed by University of Michigan academics view the state of the U.S. economy at the time it was taken.

For the surveyed results to qualify as useful information, which is to say information that policy makers can use to make sound decisions in setting policies, the surveyed sample must be representative of the U.S. population as a whole. Because if the sampling doesn't meet that statistical requirement, any policy set according to the survey's results would at a high risk of failure because it would directly lead to false conclusions. It's the policy wonk version of the "Garbage In, Garbage Out" problem from computer programming.

From the outside looking in, we should be able to tell whether a survey provides useful information from information about the population sample used to compile its findings. If the characteristics of the sampling reliably matches the characteristics of the U.S. population, then the survey is probably giving a good reading on how consumers see the U.S. economy. But if it deviates too far from the characteristics of the general population, then the odds that the survey is outputting results that belong in the garbage go way up.

Sampling appears to be a big problem with the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey. Nate Silver recengly honed in on the Michigan academics' survey samples in recent years to explain why their work product has become less than useful data:

For nearly four years, the internet has debated whether we’ve been mired in what Kyla Scanlon dubbed a “vibecession” — whether people feel worse about the economy than the underlying data suggests they “should” feel. People as esteemed as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman have frequently posted about the vibes mystery. Nate wrote a whole piece about the divergence in the New York Times two years ago.

But there’s one big problem with the discussion: most of the participants are relying on a broken survey, the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey (“Index of Consumer Sentiment” or “ICS”), that is in dire need of being repaired. Failure to correct for these issues has led to plenty of pet theories — but they explain a trend that may not even exist.

It wasn't always that way. Silver notes the degradation of the quality of the Unviersity of Michigan survey is a recent development:

The University of Michigan ICS is the gold standard sentiment survey measuring consumer sentiment. The survey has historically shown a very strong correlation with “hard” economic data such as inflation and unemployment. But before more bad analysis gets done on the vibecession, people need to know they’re working with dubious data. As with election polls, the ICS has struggled amid a shift away from telephone polling. There are issues both with partisan nonresponse, with some political groups more likely to respond than others, and partisan expressive response, with survey-takers using questions about the economy to express political sentiment.

So the problems with the ICS are these:

1. The switch to online polling made responses more negative and,
2. There are too many Democrats in the sample.

Thus, ICS data since mid-2024 is not comparable to past periods.

Silver goes into far more detail in his analysis, we do recommend reading the whole thing. Here's his conclusion:

The conclusion is simple: the ICS cannot continue to ignore its sample’s skewed partisanship in the future. And people who write about consumer and voter sentiment shouldn’t ignore the problems either. President Trump is highly unpopular, and, in contrast to his first term, his economic numbers are worse than his overall ratings. But the Michigan survey exaggerates just how sour consumers are feeling about the economy – the vibecession is partly an artifact of bad data.

The changes in the University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment Survey methodology and the excessively politicized slant of its recently targeted samples of the U.S. population have impaired the reliability of the survey. In effect, the survey's previous "gold standard" status has been debased. The Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey has become less than useful data. Worse, there is no evidence as yet the academics who manage it are attempting any course correction to make its data useful for drawing valid conclusions.

Previously on Political Calculations

Here are all the articles in the "Less Than Useful Data" series!

• Less Than Useful Data in the World of Big Data
• Less Than Useful Data: Consumer Confidence?
• Less Than Useful Data: FHFA House Price Index
• Less Than Useful Data: Index of Leading Economic Indicators
• Less Than Useful Data: Weekly Chain Store Sales
• Less Than Useful Data: Challenger Layoff Announcements
• Less Than Useful Data: ADP Employment Index
• Less Than Useful Data: Inflation Indices
• Less Than Useful Data: The Real-World Costs of Bad Data
• Less Than Useful Data: Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey

Image credit: Reliability and Validity by Nevit Dilmen on Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Deed.

The Global Carbon Budget offers a wealth of data on carbon dioxide emissions. That includes estimates of how CO₂ each nation has emitted into the Earth's atmosphere in each year since 1850. The latest edition of the report covers emissions from that year through 2024.

But that's not the whole story for atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions. When carbon dioxide is emitted into the air, it enters into the planet's carbon cycle, which extracts a portion of the emitted carbon dioxide from the air. These natural processes then play out slowly over decades, centuries, and millennia.

It's possible to estimate how much of a given year's emissions still remain in the Earth's air.

The following chart reveals both the total historic emissions of carbon dioxide and the portion of those emissions that is still present in the air from the modern day territories of the United Kingdom, India, the European Union, China, the United States, and the combined rest of the world for emissions produced in the years from 1850 through 2024.

Here are the percentages to indicate the portion of each territory's total historic emissions from 1850 through 2024 that remain in the Earth's atmosphere:

• United Kingdom: 49.3%
• India: 78.6%
• European Union: 55.7%
• China: 78.5%
• United States: 57.8%
• Rest of the World: 66.4%

The following treemap chart visualizes each territory's share of the amount of excess carbon dioxide (defined as that coming from fossil fuel combustion in the years from 1850 through 2024) that is still in the air today:

In the three years from 2021 to 2024, China's share has risen from 17.3% to 18.5%, while the United States' share has declined from 22.3% to 21.4%. With those opposing trends, we project China's emissions that remain in the air will surpass those of the United States in 2031, the timing of which is unchanged from what we projected three years ago.

References

Friedlingstein et al. Global Carbon Budget 2025, Earth System Science Data, 13 May 2026. DOI: 10.5194/essd-18-3211-2026.

Political Calculations. How Long Does Carbon Dioxide Stay in the Atmosphere? [Online Article, Tool]. 19 July 2023.

Political Calculations. How Much Fossil Fuel CO2 Is in the Air? [Online Article]. 15 August 2023.

Political Calculations. Who Made the Excess Carbon Dioxide in Today's Air?. [Online Article]. 29 September 2023.

Image credit: Carbon Cycle by NASA on Wikimedia Commons Public Domain CC0 1.0 Universal Deed.

The rate at which carbon dioxide emissions accumulate in the Earth's air fell in June 2026. This measure of human economic activity is now at levels last seen near the bottom of the coronavirus pandemic.

Because China is the world's leading producer of carbon dioxide emissions by a wide margin, the changing concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere is really telling us quite a bit about the relative health of China's economy. The falling pace of CO₂ accumulation communicates that China's productive economy is operating well below its potential.

That conclusion is supported by media reports that indicate China is experiencing its lowest economic growth since 2022. The slowing of China's economy has been visible in the trailing year average of the year-over-year change in atmospheric CO₂ concentration levels since they last peaked in January 2025.

The following chart shows how this measure has changed from January 2000 through June 2026, which allows us to compare the current decline with those recorded during the COVID era and other global economic downturns:

Getting back to the scale of China's carbon dioxide emissions, in 2024, China produced 31.8% of the world's total CO₂ emissions. By comparison, the United States produced 12.7% to rank second among nations.

References

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth System Research Laboratory. Mauna Loa Observatory CO2 Data. [Online Data]. Updated 5 July 2026.

Image Credit: Smokestack emissions from a factory in Harbin, China photo by Ziang Guo on Unsplash.