THE ECONOMY

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Like a kid who talked a big game right until it came time to jump off the high dive, Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh is likely learning in real time the big difference between saying you’ll do something and actually doing it.

You’ve already heard the news: Last week, the Federal Open Market Committee voted to keep rates steady. (Again.) Now that the dust has settled, it’s time to take a closer look at what we really learned from the Fed’s latest meeting and what CFOs might take away from it.

Talk the talk. Warsh has previously said the Federal Reserve under his command will focus on “more thinking, less talking.” He was quickly true to his word: In Warsh’s first meeting as chair in June when the committee also held rates steady, he noted that the Fed’s released statement was “a bit shorter, a bit simpler” and it scrapped “so-called forward guidance, which [the FOMC] agreed was not well suited to the current policy conjuncture.”

Yet for all the talk of not talking (or at least, talking less), it was Warsh’s previous comments that largely shaped the negative market reaction to the FOMC’s latest hold, experts said.

“He sounded very strong on inflation, talked very tough on the fact that the Fed is responsible for inflation performance, that he wishes to see inflation come down, and that the buck stops with him, essentially,” Derek Tang, an economist at MPA Macro who forecasts Fed policy developments, told CFO Brew. “You can have really good intentions and say the right things, but at the end of the day, the market needs to believe you.”

Lack of communication from the Fed will create more uncertainty.—NP

      

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STRATEGY

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SpaceX had its first-ever earnings call on August 4, and investors weren’t exactly ready for takeoff.

Shares dropped more than 13% following the call and stayed in that territory until close, even though SpaceX beat expectations by bringing in $7.8 billion in Q2 revenue, up 92% year over year, and almost halved its quarterly net loss, to $541 million.

SpaceX went public on June 12 in the largest IPO in US history. Since then, as of August 6, it’s lost more than $1 trillion in market value as its share price had fallen about 50%, from an intraday high of $225.64 to well below its offering price of $135. Its market cap of $1.4 trillion last week, CNBC noted, “isn’t supported by any of today’s financial metrics”: It’s losing billions per quarter and has “almost twice as much debt as cash.”

“SpaceX wants to tell the story they’re the market leader…But people still have these questions: How quickly can they grow? How big are the costs going to be before this thing gets to profitability?” analyst and former Tesla board member Steve Westly said Wednesday on CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe.

SpaceX is aiming for $100 million in annual recurring revenue by year’s end.—CV

      

AI FRONTIERS

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TL;DR: For the first time ever, scientists say they’ve taught AI to create brand-new viruses. The breakthrough could offer a new route for treating infections that antibiotics can’t touch, but you can probably guess the downsides…

What happened: In a new study published in Science last week, researchers at Stanford University and the Arc Institute showed that they used AI to write new viral genomes—first by teaching it to recognize the DNA structure of natural viruses, then asking it for blueprints that don’t exist. The team’s AI models, Evo 1 and Evo 2, trained on a massive library of genetic data, then specifically on viruses related to Phi X-174, a natural virus that only infects the E. coli bacteria.

Of the 700,000 potential viruses generated by Evo, nearly 300 were built in the lab, and 16 turned out to be viable. (Some multiplied even faster than Phi X-174.)

Why it matters: A mixture of the AI-designed viruses overcame E. coli strains that had learned to fend off Phi X-174 (which a comparable mix of natural viruses couldn’t do). It’s an early proof of concept that AI could be used to treat drug-resistant bacterial infections. It’s also a turning point for AI use in biology, as models move from analyzing and predicting genomes to writing complete, functional ones.

The researchers deliberately excluded certain kinds of viruses from the training data, Tech Brew reports.—LC

      

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market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads

Stat: $15 billion. That’s how much in common stock Intel is offering to support booming customer demand for AI infrastructure. (CNBC)

Quote: “The biggest change of 2026 when it comes to AI has been that the cost of using it has gone up dramatically. It went from being largely invisible on the [profit and loss statement] to being somewhere between substantial and scary, depending on which type of business you are.”—McKinsey CFO Yuval Atsmon on AI token costs (Bloomberg)

Read: Inside Waymo’s growth…and glitches. (The New York Times)

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