Market Pulse
The week opened as the last one closed, only in reverse. The S&P 500 climbed to 7,729.43, up 1.03 percent, the Nasdaq jumped 1.63 percent to 26,953.71, and the Dow Jones added 204.77 points, or 0.40 percent, to 51,887.41. Last week was mostly red. On Monday buyers came back through the same door they always use, which is chips.
The semiconductor index rose more than 2 percent to its highest level since September 9. Intel gained 13 percent and AMD added 9 percent, touching a trillion dollars in market value for the first time. A trillion for a company that five years ago was called the permanent runner-up.
Oil fell for a fourth straight trading session, the longest losing streak since June. WTI slid 3.86 percent to $92.37 a barrel and dropped back below a hundred. There is one reason, and it is the hope that Washington and Tehran will sit down again. Meanwhile a shell hit a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz and injured two people, so the price is not falling because the danger disappeared. It is falling because the market liked the sound of talks.
Bitcoin is around $85,900, up 6.2 percent on the day and at an eight-month high. Last week the Clarity Act vote burned in Congress, the market sulked, and over the weekend somebody bought that disappointment. The dollar index holds near 100, and the ten-year Treasury yield slipped just under 5 percent.
Gold pulled back, though sources disagree on how far. Yahoo Finance shows roughly $4,389 an ounce and a 0.82 percent decline, while CNBC logged $4,309 that same morning against Friday’s $4,364. The gap runs to eighty dollars, and it is the most interesting number in this brief, because it shows how far quotes have drifted apart as the metal has repriced.
Lithuania & Baltics
Drone maker RSI Europe will invest up to 50 million euros in a plant in the Panevėžys district. The agreement with the Ministry of the Economy and Innovation lets the company lease state land without an auction. The plant is due by the end of 2027, will employ about 50 people, and is designed for roughly 120,000 drones and other defence systems a year. Company revenue doubled last year to 15.5 million euros, and management expects three to fourfold growth this year. Twelve NATO militaries already use its Špokas systems, and about 80 percent of output goes to Ukraine. The site sits in the Upytė district on land farmed by Genetiniai Ištekliai, a company under the Ministry of Agriculture. Agriculture Minister Kęstutis Mažeika learned the location from the press and says this is the second time the country has stepped on the same rake, after the Rheinmetall plant.
Defence Minister Robertas Kaunas is in the United States from September 20 to 26. His schedule includes Deputy Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, Senators Patty Murray and Roger Wicker, and the defence firms Lockheed Martin, Palantir, Northrop Grumman, Mach Industries and Epirus. The central question is the same one as in summer, which is how many American troops stay in Lithuania and for how long. Over the past three years Lithuania has bought roughly 2 billion euros of American weapons and is the largest US arms customer in the Baltics, so the conversation has weight behind it.
President Gitanas Nausėda has left for New York and the 81st session of the UN General Assembly. On Tuesday he addresses world leaders for the eighth time, speaking on conflicts, the risks of artificial intelligence, and historical memory. The trip also includes the sixth International Crimea Platform summit and a Baltic leaders’ meeting with António Guterres.
Wholesale electricity in Lithuania fell 16 percent on the week to 96 euros per megawatt-hour. Consumption dropped 3 percent to 251 GWh, wind farms produced 14 percent less, solar parks 35 percent less, and imports jumped 54 percent to 87 GWh, half of it from Sweden and 43 percent from Latvia. We generate less, buy more, and the price falls. That says something about a regional surplus rather than about our own capacity.
Eksplosita will invest 5 million euros in a first phase for a charges and mines plant in the Pakruojis district. European defence commissioner Andrius Kubilius, meanwhile, is urging preparation for mass attacks rather than for single drones.
Europe
Germany’s state elections ended the way polls said they would, only worse. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern the AfD won with 38 percent, the Social Democrats trailed at 36.5 percent, and Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats took 4.9 percent and fell below the five percent threshold. It is the party’s worst result in eighty-one years. In Berlin the Left won with 25.7 percent against 18.8 percent for the Christian Democrats.
Merz called the outcome a disaster and promised to hold the governing coalition together. European markets did not react at all, and that in itself is information. A chancellor whose party polled below the hard right in two states still has to sign defence budgets running to 2029.
Poland is seeking up to 15,000 US troops and a permanent base. A Pentagon delegation held talks in Warsaw on September 10. At the same time European intelligence services are warning about a rise in Russian provocations, and air traffic in the United Kingdom was disrupted again.
Ukraine
A very large drone wave flew into Russia overnight. Moscow claims it downed more than 1,900 drones, eight guided aerial bombs, eight cruise missiles and four rockets, and says about 1,600 drones have been intercepted since Saturday, roughly 450 of them heading for Moscow. Volodymyr Zelensky said the long-range response around Moscow had real weight, because the targets were carrying the billions that feed the war machine.
Zelensky will meet Donald Trump in New York. The meeting takes place on the margins of the General Assembly, with Washington again pressing for talks. Diplomats will discuss peace while both sides fly drones hundreds of kilometres from the front.
Ukraine’s Naftogaz will build gas storage in Hungary, and the European Union has said it will not recognise Russian elections held in occupied Ukrainian territory.
Geopolitics
Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meet at the White House on Thursday. Tariffs, artificial intelligence and rare earth metals are on the agenda. Beijing expects an announcement of roughly 30 billion dollars of duty-free or near duty-free imports in exchange for the purchase commitments it made in May. The current truce provision, the suspension of raised reciprocal tariffs, expires on November 10, so the clock is running. Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Elon Musk and Jensen Huang are expected at the dinner.
The US Treasury Secretary announced sanctions on Iranian air carriers, more than two dozen of them, under the Economic Outcast campaign. At the same time there is talk of restarting negotiations, and the market chose to believe the second message.
Trump says a large deal on buying Belarusian fertiliser is taking shape. Last December Washington already lifted sanctions on Belaruskali in exchange for the release of 123 political prisoners, and this year it asked Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine to reopen transit. In this story the port of Klaipėda is not an observer. It is the object.
Russian and Iranian cooperation keeps widening, with the aim of routing around sanctions through shared logistics and payment channels.
Central Banks
The Fed raised rates by 25 basis points on September 16 to 3.75 to 4.00 percent. It is the first hike since July 2023, and the vote was unanimous, twelve in favour and none against. In the projections, sixteen of eighteen participants expect another increase, four see as many as two, and twelve think rates will sit a quarter point higher by year end. Kevin Warsh submits no dot of his own, because he does not want his hands tied.
Eight Fed speeches are scheduled this week. At Jackson Hole in August, Warsh said that price stability does not happen by itself and that inflation does not necessarily revert to the mean. Since then the market reads every sentence as guidance, even though he refuses on principle to give any.
IPO Radar
Anthropic is aiming at October and at a record. The talk is of raising up to 100 billion dollars at a valuation near 2 trillion, against the 965 billion valuation in the June 1 filing. At the top of that range it would be the largest listing in history.
OpenAI is backing off. In an interview published Saturday by Fortune, Sam Altman said going public now would be ill-advised, pushing the debut to 2027 at the earliest. Two companies, one sector, opposite directions over a single weekend.
What to Watch Tomorrow
Nausėda’s General Assembly speech. His eighth, with artificial intelligence standing beside war and historical memory.
The Trump and Zelensky meeting in New York. Either a concrete deadline comes out of it, or we get good talks about good talks again.
Oil and Hormuz. A fourth day of declines rests on one assumption, that negotiations will start. If they do not, 92 dollars will look cheap.
Fed speakers. After a unanimous hike, every nuance about the October 28 meeting gets repriced within minutes.
Calm in the German coalition. Merz promises to hold, but a party that polls 4.9 percent usually has internal questions.
The Bear’s Take
The Fed hikes unanimously, oil falls for a fourth day, bitcoin leaps to an eight-month high, and chips rally as though money were cheap. A contradiction? No, these are two different markets on one screen. One prices inflation, the other prices a promise of liquidity. In Germany the governing party took 4.9 percent in one state, and that, not the charts, is where this cycle is actually breaking.
Sources
Reuters, Bloomberg, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Al Jazeera, CNN, NPR, Politico Europe, US News, The National, RFE/RL, Fortune, Federal Reserve, Trading Economics, LRT, BNS, 15min, Alkas, Nord Pool, Lithuanian Ministry of the Economy and Innovation, Ministry of National Defence, Office of the President.
These are my notes on what moved today. The money is yours and so are the decisions. I am just watching the same screen.