Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today: #
Fortune’sradar today:
- Everyone agrees that AI could kill us all. But will Congress do anything about it?
- The leaders made by September 11—[and the ones it took](https://fortune.com/2026/09/11/911-leaders-crisis-jeff-immelt-lutnick-rick-rescorla/) .
- Scott Bessent picked a fight with the bond vigilantes—[it’s unlikely he will win](https://fortune.com/2026/09/10/10-year-treasury-yield-inflation-fed/) .
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Low-paid workers are getting better pay raises.
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The AI boom has already far eclipsed the dot-com boom.
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The price of Princess Diana’s off-the-shoulder “revenge” dress.
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RIP, Pumpkin Spice Latte. It’s not your season anymore . ➡️ Did someone forward this email to you? If you would like to receive this information directly, every morning before the markets open in New York, sign up here**.**
ONE BIG THING
The bond vigilantes ride again #
A hot war, a trade war, a bad harvest, a snarl in shipping. Supply shocks have come so often over the past six years, KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk told Fortune, that they’ve started to sound like a drumbeat.
“With a drumbeat you get a rhythm,” she told Fortune’s Eva Roytburg, “and with the rhythm you learn.” Households and businesses have learned to brace for the next price shock, but the bond market started pricing it in this week. The 10-year Treasury yield touched 4.92% on Thursday, its highest level since 2023 and just shy of the 5% red line feared by Wall Street. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s attempts to strong-arm the bond market have been drowned out by the Iran war’s steady drumbeat, with oil back above $100 a barrel. Now Fed funds futures put the odds of a rate hike next week at roughly 67%, but the bond market, taking Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s advice, isn’t waiting to play referee; it’s playing the ball.
Swonk’s fear is that letting the bond market do that tightening only makes the problem worse.
The bond market will overshoot, she said, because investors will demand more of a premium if they begin to doubt the central bank’s willingness to contain inflation. “The Fed controls the short end,” she added. “The bond vigilantes control the long end.”
MORE FROM FORTUNE
NATO Innovation Fund on liftoff: the first European private company reaching orbit - Patrick Schneider Sikorsky and David Ordonez
How often you check your phone matters more than how long you spend on it—and if you watch brain rot, you’re burning yourself out - Catherina Gioino
Meta built an AI that can shop for you. The problem is that most people don’t want AI spending their money - Tatiana Sataua
AI solves overtourism’s ‘concentration problem’ by helping people find hidden gems, says Klook cofounder Ethan Lin - Angelica Ang
Exec gave his Gen Z kids a list of ‘daddy tips’ when they became old enough to work—it included showing up on time and ‘bringing value to a meeting’ - Orianna Rosa Royle
AI-UGH
Everyone agrees AI could kill us all. Maybe Congress should do something about it. #
Anthropic reported yesterday that its platform was used by malign actors who appeared to be trying to build biological weapons on five occasions. The company admitted that this was “one of the most serious risks of frontier AI models.”
The report comes after a series of disclosures from Anthropic and OpenAI that their models produced agents that acted maliciously, in secret, to do things that would be criminal if performed by humans—such as hacking into other companies.
It essentially provides the “receipts” for claims by Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at both OpenAI and Anthropic, that “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” and “neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
As the WSJ put it last night: “A groundswell of urgency over artificial intelligence is surging in Congress amid growing fears that the technology could destroy civilization.” Among the potential regulatory developments are a new federal agency to oversee AI safety, mandatory kill-switches in AI models, and a new oversight committee in the House.
Hugging Face cofounder Thomas Wolf has a must-read column in the FT describing what it was like to come under attack from OpenAI’s rogue agents:
- “Around 1,200 AI agents were working together as a swarm for weeks — trying the same thing over and again in order to find the solution to a cyber challenge set by OpenAI. They overrode limitations, downloaded software to get online and then 700 of them attacked Hugging Face, taking security details to gain access to the system.”
- “An additional problem was that our cyber security AI analysis tools, based on Anthropic’s Claude Code, refused to engage with part of the investigation.”
- “It would be a mistake to dismiss the seriousness of these events.”
Notably, Bridgewater CIO Greg Jensen says the risk of human extinction is real. (Bridgewater is an investor in both OpenAI and Anthropic.) He likens this moment to February 2020, when humans first began trying to figure out whether Covid-19 was going to be a big deal or not.
- [An N.Y.U. Mathematician Clashed With OpenAI Over a $1 Million Proof](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaster-openai-math-navier-stokes.html) - NYT
- [Governments are turning to Claude to automate spying](https://www.axios.com/2026/09/10/anthropic-claude-government-surveillance-threats) - Axios
9/11
Today is the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks #
In 2001, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. He lost his brother and 657 other employees when the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, writes Fortune’s Diane Brady. Lutnick was late for work that day because he decided to drop his son, Kyle, off at kindergarten. Diane met him a few weeks later and teared up as he talked about the feeling of losing more than two-thirds of his workforce and the challenge of continuing to issue paychecks to grieving families when trading revenue collapsed. Cantor Fitzgerald continues to mark 9/11 each year by committing a full day’s revenue to charity.
9-to-5
The low-hire, low-fire job market may have come to an end among lower-paid workers #
Workers who switch jobs usually get a pay rise that is greater than those who stay loyal to their employers—except since 2022, when the U.S. labor market went into a low-hire-low-fire funk and the reward for job-switching disappeared. This year, however, that seems to be changing. “Pay increases associated with changing jobs reached their highest level in more than three years in July,” Bank of America’s Liz Everett Krisberg and David Tinsley said in a recent email.
The rewards for job switchers are especially great among people who are paid via weekly paychecks. This chart shows how weekly wage earners received raises that were four times greater than non-switching workers:
“Weekly pay schedules are disproportionately concentrated in industries with large hourly workforces and variable hours, particularly construction, leisure and hospitality, transportation and warehousing, and portions of retail trade. These jobs often skew lower income,” Krisberg and Tinsley say.
That could be one reason that one aspect of the K-shaped economy is going into reverse. Through 2025, higher earners had boasted the majority of the after-tax wage growth, significantly ahead of lower-paid peers. But in the spring and early summer of this year, the earnings growth of those on the lower end of the income scale took off, rising from approximately 1% to approximately 5% (on a three-month moving average, year-over-year percentage, seasonally adjusted).
Conversely, wage growth among higher earners dropped from 6% to just below 4%. BofA suggests that lower tax withholding following the One Big Beautiful Bill Act explains some of the shift, along with a stronger labor market for lower-paid workers.
THE MARKETS
Oil hits $104 per barrel as Iran tightens its hold on the Red Sea #
The price of Brent crude oil was $104 per barrel this morning and—ironically—that’s the good news. It hit $109.86 overnight after the Houthis, Iran’s proxy terror group in Yemen, captured almost all of Yemen’s coastline on the Bab al-Mandab Strait in the Red Sea. This now gives Iran the ability to shut down oil exports from both sides of the Arabian Peninsula, channels that together used to transport about one third of the world’s oil supply.
Unsurprisingly, stocks in Asia—which is highly dependent on imported oil—sold off today. But markets in Europe rallied, and U.S. futures perked up before the open in New York.
Traders will be watching for a new U.S. CPI inflation number for August from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, expected to be released at 8.30 a.m. ET. The Dow Jones consensus estimate is for 3.4%. The Fed futures market currently shows a 67% probability that the central bank will raise rates at its meeting next week.
Chart via TradingEconomics.com
- S&P 500 futures were up 0.55% this morning. The index closed down 0.58% yesterday.
- In Europe, the Stoxx 600 was up 0.45% in early trading and the U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.45% before lunch.
- Asia: South Korea’s KOSPI was down 1.76%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 1.93%. India’s Nifty 50 was down 0.18%. China’s CSI 300 was down 0.84%.
- Brent crude was $104 per barrel this morning.
- Bitcoin was at $77,007.
The S&P 500 is trying to set a record that hasn’t been broken in 70 years #
Since 1955, the S&P 500’s earnings-per-share have reliably gained about 6.5% per year, and stuck within a predictable range around that number. But recently the index’s profits have moved upward. “The debate will rage on as to whether this is a sustainable new plateau or an artificial period of AI-related elevated earnings,” Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid said in a note.
CHARTS OF THE DAY
Each year of the AI boom is bigger than the entirety of the dot-com boom #
It might be a statement of the obvious, but you don't get a sense of how big the AI boom really is until you see the data visually. “The top 5 capex spenders are spending more than double that of the remaining 495 in the S&P 500,” Jim Reid and his colleagues at Deutsche Bank said in recent notes containing these charts
Deutsche’s Adrian Cox added that, “This boom is remarkable not just for scale but also speed. Each year of expected capex through 2030 exceeds the whole dot-com telecoms boom.”
PAIN AT THE PUMP
Diesel sellers learn they should have bought pumps that go to eleven* #
The price of diesel in the U.S. is now so high that some gas station pumps have hit their price display limit, at $9.999 per gallon, Fortune’s Jordan Blum reports. The $9.999 listing is usually only used to warn drivers that the pumps are out of fuel.
NUMBER OF THE DAY: The price of revenge
$150,000-$300,000 #
The estimated price range for the late Princess Diana’s little black, off-the-shoulder “revenge” dress, which is coming up for sale at Sotheby’s in New York on December 9. She infamously wore the dress to a 1994 Vanity Fair magazine party at the Serpentine Gallery in London, shortly after she separated from Prince (now King) Charles.
THE FRONT PAGES TODAY
[Scott Bessent fails to break ‘fever’ in US bond market](https://www.ft.com/content/dd4cc4a0-844e-486a-b99c-b379d457019b?syn-25a6b1a6=1) - FT
[Bessent says ‘a large bank’ will be sanctioned on Monday as part of Iran strategy](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/11/bessent-large-bank-sanctioned.html) - CNBC
[MBS urged Trump to strike Houthis amid Red Sea threat](https://www.axios.com/2026/09/11/houthis-yemen-saudi-trump-mbs-strikes) - Axios
[Sept. 11 Changed the World Order. But Not for the Reason We May Think.](https://www.wsj.com/world/sept-11-changed-world-order-1508c504) - WSJ
[Ukraine Strikes Degrade Russian Oil-Refining Industry, IEA Says](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-11/ukraine-strikes-degrade-russian-oil-refining-industry-iea-says) - Bloomberg
[Behind the Scenes, Vance Gathered Unvarnished Views of the Iran War](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/us/politics/vance-iran-war-trump-munitions.html) - NYT
ONE MORE THING
Pumpkin Spice Latte is dead. Long live Caramel Apple Pie Latte. #
“Caramel Apple Pie is the only fall coffee flavor McDonald’s is releasing this year.” It was with those words that the Pumpkin Spice Latte era came to an end, Fortune’s Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez reports. Google searches for “pumpkin spice latte” still surge on cue as the fall season approaches. But new flavors like matcha and chai now have even greater search activity. This year, over 260% more people searched for “matcha latte” than “pumpkin spice latte,” according to Google Trends. Chains are rolling out a range of apple-based flavors this year as it dawns on them that PSL has peaked, basically.
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