From Tuesday through Thursday, the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) clocked three new record highs during the trading week ending Friday, 15 August 2025. The index however dipped slightly on the week's final day of trading to close out the week at 6,449.80, which was up 0.9% from the previous week's closing value. And as it happens, down about 0.3% from its latest record high of 6,468.54 on Thursday, 14 August 2025.

Headlines involving inflation did the most the move stock prices during the week that was. Tuesday, 12 August 2025 launched the series of new highs with the news U.S. consumer price inflation came in lower than expected. That positive momentum was capped off on Thursday, when the producer price index came in higher than expected.

The inflation headlines drove stock prices mainly because of their effect on the expectations for how much and when the Federal Reserve will be setting interest rates through the end of 2025. The CME Group's FedWatch Tool projects the Fed will cut the Federal Funds Rate by a quarter percent at its 17 September (2025-Q3) meeting. Beyond that date, the FedWatch tool forecasts additional quarter point rate cuts will take place on 29 October (2025-Q4) and 28 January (2026-Q1).

The latest update of the alternative futures chart shows the S&P 500's trajectory is continuing to track along the lower end of the redzone forecast range.

The redzone forecast range is based on the assumption investors would hold their forward-looking attention on the distant future quarter of 2026-Q1 throughout the period it runs. The S&P 500's trajectory however is more consistent with investors focusing their attention on the nearer term quarter of 2025-Q4. We think that focus is related to the uncertainty investors have over how many rate cuts will take place during this final quarter of 2025.

Here are the week's market moving headlines:

Monday, 11 August 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Oil steady as markets focus on US-Russia talks
• Nvidia, AMD to pay 15% of China chip sale revenues to US, official says
• Bigger trouble developing in Japan:
• Japan's deepening political woes cloud budget, rate hike timing
• U.S. stocks slide as investors brace for a week of key inflation data
• Wall Street stocks end down, inflation data, China trade in focus
• Nvidia, AMD to pay 15% of China chip sale revenues to US, official says

Tuesday, 12 August 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• July CPI: Consumer prices rose 0.2%, just below expectations
• CPI in charts: Annual headline inflation rate holds steady in July, core figure ticks up
• US, China extend tariff truce by 90 days, staving off surge in duties
• Oil prices hold steady as US and China extend tariffs deadline
• Cheaper gasoline restrains US consumer prices; worries about data quality rise
• Fed minions falling into line with need for rate cuts, Fed Chair facing legal pressure:
• Markets now pricing in three Fed rate cuts after July consumer inflation data
• Jobs data blasted by Trump seen by Fed officials as reason to cut
• Richmond Fed's Barkin: Consumers will be key to coming inflation, jobs results
• Trump cites 'major lawsuit' against Fed's Powell, again urges rate cut
• Bigger trouble developing in China:
• China factories cut shifts and workers' pay as US tariffs bite
• Central bank rate cuts in Australia:
• Australia cuts interest rates, signals more to come as inflation slows
• S&P, Nasdaq notch record closes as CPI data fuels Fed rate cut bets
• S&P 500, Nasdaq end at record closing highs as moderate inflation lifts rate hopes

Wednesday, 13 August 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Oil falls as IEA raises supply forecast, investors await US-Russia meeting
• US 30-year mortgage rate dropped last week, refi applications surged
• Fed minions send mixed signals on rate hikes:
• Fed cut seen near certain after inflation data, Bessent comments
• Fed's Goolsbee signals door open to rate cut in fall
• Fed grappling with impact of tariffs as it ponders rate decisions, Goolsbee says
• Fed can wait to adjust policy because job market is near full employment, Bostic says
• BOJ minions urged to hike Japan's interest rates, get their house in order:
• Bessent says BOJ is 'behind the curve' on inflation, likely to hike rates, in Bloomberg interview
• Japan's wholesale inflation slows for 4th month in July
• BOJ faces pressure to ditch obscure inflation gauge, clear path to tighter policy
• S&P 500, Nasdaq hit new closing highs on rate cut hopes
• Dow surges 1%, just misses out on record close; S&P and Nasdaq rise

Thursday, 14 August 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US producer inflation heats up as goods, services prices soar
• Instant view: US producer prices surge more than expected
• Oil prices climb 2% to 1-week high as Fed rate cut, Trump-Putin talks loom
• Fed minions push back on call for bigger rate cut:
• Fed's Daly says 50 basis point rate cut next month doesn't seem warranted, WSJ reports
• Bigger trouble developing in Eurozone, ECB expected to sustain pause in rate cuts:
• Euro zone industry shrinks more than feared in June but GDP holds up
• ECB to hold rates until at least December on stable economic outlook: Reuters poll
• Wall Street ends flat, but S&P hits another closing high as rate-cut bets waver
• Wall Street ended the day flat after a hotter-than-expected PPI report

Friday, 15 August 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Oil falls ahead of Trump-Putin summit in Alaska
• US manufacturing production stalls in July
• Even economists expect Fed minions to cut rates in September, Fed minions claim they want more inflation data before they do:
• US Fed to cut rates in September and once more this year, say most economists: Reuters poll
• Fed's Goolsbee: want more assurance on inflation to cut in Sept or autumn
• Bigger trouble developing in China:
• China's factory output, retail sales growth slump in blow to economy
• China's new home prices fall 0.3% in July
• China's property investment falls 12% y/y in January-July
• BOJ minions get better than expected GDP data and inflation data that backs plan for rate hike:
• Japan's economy expands annualised 1.0% in April-June
• Japan's July inflation rate likely eased but remained above BOJ target: Reuters poll
• Dow ends higher after UnitedHealth gains, other indexes slip on rate cut uncertainty
• Wall Street ended mostly lower as investors eye Trump-Putin summit in Alaska
• UnitedHealth surges after Warren Buffett bets on recovery

The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow tool projection of real GDP growth in the U.S. during the current quarter of 2025-Q2 held steady at +2.5% over the past week.

Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of Federal Reserve officials meeting with a tarot card reader who is advising them on how to set the Federal Funds Rate in September 2025".

Summer is a season for hamburgers. But when it's hot and humid out, how much time do you want to spend outside grilling hamburgers? How fast can you fully cook a hamburger patty?

That seems like a simple question, but if you want to use math and the physics of heat transfer to work out the fastest way to cook your hamburgers, it presents a lot of variables you have to take into account. Unless, that is, you simplify the problem in ways that can eliminate them.

For instance, how fast a hamburger cooks will be influenced by the shape of the patty to name just one factor. You could go for a traditional disc-shaped patty or even a Wendy's-style square-shaped patty. But how those burgers cook will be influenced by how heat from the grill 'wraps' around them even as it cooks through the meat from below. It's not hard to have the edges of a burger be the most well-done portion of it, but that may mean the inside of the burger isn't as well-cooked as you might like. How can you ensure your burger is evenly cooked?

For a mathematician or physicist, one way to remove the patty shape as a variable is to assume the burger will be grilled on an infinite plane that only allows the meat to be exposed to heat from the grill on one side at a time. With that assumption, you can count on having the burger be cooked evenly through at all parts. When you do that, you also simplify the problem to be one in which the only variable you have to consider is how often you will flip the burger while cooking it.

That's what one mathematician did in a paper published earlier this year. Here's a plain English summary of what they found when they did the math:

Craving a hamburger but in a hurry? If you wish to find out the quickest way to cook a patty, mathematics can actually help you.

Jean-Luc Thiffeault, a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has found that the timing between flips and the number of flips hold the key to the fastest way to cook a meat patty. Moreover, increasing the frequency of flips reduces cooking time by nearly a third.

In his study, published in Physica D on June 17, the researcher used mathematics to study how heat moves through a slab of meat, which simultaneously cooks on the bottom side and cools on the top until the meat is flipped. Eventually, his analysis showed that flipping the patty heats the meat evenly, therefore speeding up the cooking process. He also found that more flips lead to faster cooking.

According to the study, a theoretical 1-centimeter-thick patty that's flipped just once is cooked in 80 seconds. On the other hand, flipping it 10 times at intervals ranging from six to 11 seconds results in a cooking time of only 69 seconds. A maximum decrease of 29% in cooking time is then observed when the patties are continuously flipped.

However, after a threshold is reached, the effect of the number of flips on cooking time becomes inconsequential.

"After three or four flips, the gain in time is negligible," Thiffeault said.

But that's for flipping a burger that fills a grill whose surface is an infinite plane. How does that compare with real-world burger flipping?

As it happens, someone has flipped enough real-world burgers to verify the math-only results:

The study's findings resonate with the observations chef and food writer J. Kenji López-Alt shared in a 2019 article. In the said piece, López-Alt compared the time it took for a burger's internal temperature to reach about 52° Celsius using a certain cooking method he followed. He then realized that flipping the patty every 15 seconds, compared to just once, shortened cooking time by nearly a third.

So there you have it. Flipping a patty once every 15 seconds will get your burgers cooked through about as fast as you can hope to cook it. How many flips you need will ultimately come down to how well-done you want your burgers to be cooked.

Image Credit: A person is grilling a hamburger on a grill photo by Amirhossein Shirdelan on Unsplash.

China is, by a very wide margin, the world's biggest producer of carbon dioxide emissions.

China's emissions of CO₂ are so large that we can use measurements of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere collected by the remote Mauna Loa Observatory to get a relatively good sense of how its economy is performing. The reason we can do that is because China's production of materials like steel and cement, which are major contributors to its CO₂ emissions, are directly linked to its growth. Not uncoincidentally, China is the world's largest producer of both materials, with much of its production supporting the construction and industrial sectors of its economy. The following video we found to illustrate this article shows both coming together in a Chinese factory that produces prefabricated reinforced concrete panels for buildings.

In July 2025, the rate at which carbon dioxide is accumulating in the Earth's atmosphere slowed for the fifth time in the last six months. Measured as the trailing year average of the year-over-year rate of change in the atmospheric concentration of CO₂, this measure peaked in January 2025. Since then, it has fallen by nearly 11%, reversing what had been an period of increase dating back to the end of China's zero-Covid lockdowns at the end of December 2022.

The following chart shows how this measure has evolved from January 2000 through July 2025:

Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration data lags behind changes in CO₂ output, taking several weeks to diffuse into the Earth's air after being emitted. The peak in January 2025 coincides with Chinese emissions peaking in December 2024, which itself coincides with efforts by China's exporters to crank up production to beat the clock on new U.S. trade tariffs going into effect in 2025. January 2025 saw the Biden administration final tariff increases go into effect, while President Trump's new tariffs were put into effect in April 2025.

Since the atmosphere's pace of CO₂ accumulation peaked at 3.57 ppm in January 2025, it has fallen by 0.38 ppm to 3.19 ppm in July 2025. With an estimate world population of 8.005 billion people, that drop represents roughly a reduction of 3 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. It also represents an estimated $12.6 trillion decline in the world's GDP during the last six months.

The decline in China's CO₂ emissions have been large enough that scientists are speculating it may represent a permanent peak in the country's emissions, with China's expansion of renewable energy sources like solar and hydroelectric power. While that remains to be seen, for now, this observation tells us that the portions of China's economy that are the heaviest users of the reliable power production supported by burning fossil fuels are struggling. Those sectors are, not uncoincidentally, the ones that produce steel and cement, whose production has been falling because China's economy is struggling. As described by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air: "The steel and cement industries are the largest CO2 emitters in China, when emissions from their electricity use are included. They are also bellwethers of real estate, infrastructure and other fixed asset investments that play an outsized role in China's emissions and economy."

Research at the Mauna Loa Observatory has been targeted for potential funding cuts. We suggest that funding should continue because of the value of the CO₂ data it collects which is correlated with economic output, especially China's. Given that China's economic data is becoming more opaque over time and how large its CO₂ emissions are, U.S. intelligence services may find it useful to continue funding the observatory's measurements of carbon dioxide because of the practical application of what that data can tell us about the state of China's economy.

Or for that matter, assessing the magnitude of other geopolitical events.

References

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth System Research Laboratory. Mauna Loa Observatory CO2 Data. [Online Data]. Updated 5 August 2025.

As expected, June 2025 was another devastating month for trade between the U.S. and China.

The high tariffs U.S. President Donald Trump and China's Communist Party General Chairman Xi Jinping have imposed on each other's goods since President Trump initiated them on the 2 April 2025 "Liberation Day" event ensured that outcome. The combined value of goods exchanged between the U.S. and China totaled $28.4 billion in June 2025, which was slightly up from the $27.0 billion figure recorded in May. June 2025's combined trade is 37.5% below the equivalent figure reported a year earlier for June 2024.

U.S. exports to China rebounded from May 2025's dismal level to fall by just 16.6% year-over-year, while China's exports to the U.S. plummeted by 44.5%.

That doesn't take the seasonal variation of trade between the two countries into account. The following chart presents the monthly figures for the combined value of goods exchanged between the U.S. and China along with the trailing twelve month average, which smooths out the year-to-year variation in the trade data.

The chart also features a counterfactual projection illustrating what the trailing year average would look like had the new tariff war between the U.S. and China not taken place. In the three months since it erupted, we find the actual trajectory of U.S.-China trade is 9.0% below the levels it would reasonably have been expected to be without it. In the absence of trade deals, this difference will continue growing while older data in the rolling average falls off and is replaced by newer, lower trade data.

Next month's data may see the trade figures perk up because of the deal struck between the U.S. and China at the end of June 2025 for rare earth materials. In the absence of a larger deal to significantly lower the tariffs both nations have imposed to date however, we anticipate the trend will continue downward. There are signals Xi and Trump will meet to finalize a deal, but at this writing, no deal has yet been reached.

We do have growing evidence of the extent to which 2025's U.S.-China tariff war is negatively impacting China's economy, which we'll cover in the very near future.

References

U.S. Census Bureau. U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services (FT900). U.S. Trade in Goods with China, Not Seasonally Adjusted, Nominal Figures, Total Census Basis. [Online database]. Accessed 5 August 2025.

Image credit: U.S. President Donald Trump alongside General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping on 8 November 2017 by Shealah Craighead on Flickr. Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal Deed.

The employment situation for older U.S. teens worsened in July 2025.

Seasonally-adjusted data reported in the household survey portion of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' jobs report for July 2025 counted some 3,290,000 teens Age 18 and 19 as having jobs, which is the lowest figure recorded for this demographic since December 2021. The number of employed teens in this group had peaked at 3,801,000 in February 2025.

As a percentage of the entire Age 18-19 group, employed teens have gone from a high of 45.9% in December 2024 to just 39.2% of this population in the last seven months. Most of that decline has taken place since February 2025, in which 45.6% of the older teen had been recorded as being employed.

By contrast, the employment situation for younger between Age 16 and 17 has been largely flat through this period. Younger teens have seen their employment prospects dim over an longer period of time, going from a peak of 25.6% of their portion of the U.S. population to 21% in July 2025.

The following pair of charts presents seasonally adjusted U.S. teen employment and the teen employed-to-population ratio from January 2021 through July 2025.

The figures and percentages presented in these charts have each been subjected to their own seasonal adjustment by the analysts at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, so the number of employed Americans Age 16-17 and employed Americans Age 18-19 won't necessarily add up to the indicated number of working Americans in the whole Age 16-19 bracket. If you want numbers that do add up, aside from small rounding errors, you'll want to access the non-seasonally adjusted data available at the BLS' data site.

The household survey data which gives demographic insights into the composition of the U.S. labor force was not affected by the negative revisions included in the establishment survey.

The employment data for teens from the household survey however supports the interpretation of the U.S. job market as weakening, which the negative revisions to the establishement survey would appear to have finally caught up to and confirmed.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 1 August 2025.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon illustrating that older teenagers are having trouble getting jobs in the US".