Dear Trader,
Mark's bringing Andrew on this morning, and they picked a good day for it.
The Fed's expected to hike today for the first time since 2023. Mortgage rates just crossed 6.97%, the highest in over a year. The Senate killed the crypto bill everybody swore was a lock, and Jensen Huang took a phone call from the president in the middle of a live panel.
Mark and Andrew will get into all three stories below, plus whatever the market does at the open, and they'll take your questions live.
This link adds State of the Market to your calendar.
The Daily News Breakdown
SIREN: Mortgage rates just hit 6.97%, the highest since May 2025. That's a 12 basis point jump in a single week, and it lands the same morning the Fed's expected to hike for the first time since 2023. Back in February, before the Iran war, rates sat at their lowest since 2022.
Then oil went up, inflation talk came back, and the 10-year yield climbed to levels we haven't seen in almost 20 years. Mortgages track the 10-year, so here we are.
Refi applications fell 8.8% to their lowest since May 2025, because nobody refinances into a worse deal. Purchase applications slipped too. Today's Fed decision won't touch mortgage rates directly, but it'll shake the bond market that sets them.
SNEAKER: The Clarity Act died in the Senate Tuesday, and Mike Novogratz says the government "feels broken." The crypto market structure bill needed 60 votes and didn't get them. Eighteen months of bipartisan work fell apart over one issue: ethics rules on a president profiting from digital assets.
Republicans wouldn't cap how much a president can make off crypto, and Democrats decided this was the industry where they'd pick a corruption fight. A few Republicans also bailed after community banks lobbied hard against stablecoin reward rules.
Bitcoin dropped from nearly $80,000 to around $75,600, and Coinbase (COIN), Robinhood (HOOD) and Strategy (MSTR) all sold off into this morning. Raymond James says there's a difference between dead and mostly dead, which sounds nice until you look at the midterm calendar.
SIGN: Jensen Huang says AI doesn't need new laws, and the president agrees with him. Huang spent Tuesday telling anyone with a microphone that safety is an engineering problem, so let the companies test their own products and skip the regulation. That's a direct answer to Anthropic's Dario Amodei, who published an essay over the weekend asking the big labs to coordinate on slowing frontier model development, possibly with an antitrust waiver.
Huang also runs Nvidia (NVDA), the company that sells the chips those labs buy, so his enthusiasm for full speed shouldn't shock anyone.
A day earlier, Trump phoned Huang live onstage at the All-In Summit, called AI safety "a hoax," and called data centers the oil of the next 20 or 25 years. That tells you where the White House lands on this.