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Good morning.
First, Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek made an algorithmically-charged blueprint of your music taste. Now, he’s offering one for your entire body. Ek’s body-scanning startup Neko Health announced Tuesday that its first US clinic will open in New York City on September 24.
Customers can pay $499 to undergo “non-invasive and radiation-free” scans that Neko says capture millions of data points. Neko evaluates a person’s cardiovascular health, skin, blood, vital signs, grip strength, body fat and more, providing a review of how their body is functioning within an hour. The firm said thousands of New Yorkers are already on the waitlist. Just don’t complain when it recommends a playlist of monotonous coffee shop indie folk for elevated blood pressure.
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MARKETS
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Stock data as of market close on August 18, 2026.
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Photo via Li Yuanqing / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom
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Watch out, Fed. The bond market is coming for your job.
The US central bank may set short-term policy rates, but it’s the free market that controls where long-term Treasury yields head. Bond investors are demanding higher yields, essentially raising the cost of borrowing money no matter what the Federal Open Market Committee decides to do at its September meeting (as of Tuesday afternoon, odds are 65% that it will again hold rates steady).
The 30-year Treasury yield skyrocketed to its highest level in 19 years this week. The bond sell-off has also spread overseas: Japan’s 10-year bond yield hit a 30-year high while France and Germany’s equivalents have surged, too. It seems the US is not alone in worrying about the war in Iran increasing oil prices, still-high inflation and ballooning national debt. And investors are fed up with assuming the risk that comes with buying government bonds for little pay.
The jump in bond yields “suggests investors are losing patience with fiscal profligacy,” Jonas Goltermann, chief markets economist at Capital Economics, told Reuters.
Hungry for Higher Yields
While investors are worried about government debt, they’re also finding tantalizing offers elsewhere, making Treasurys look even less appealing. Hyperscalers behind the AI boom like Alphabet and Meta are issuing billions of dollars in bonds to pay for chips and data centers. The rise in Japan’s yields, meanwhile, brings even more competition for the US, since Japanese investors who tend to buy up US Treasurys can now find attractive yields closer to home.
“Whoever’s issuing, be it a government or a hyperscaler or a non-hyperscaler credit, is now competing with more borrowers,” Tony Rodriguez, head of fixed-income strategy at Nuveen Asset Management, told Bloomberg. “Therefore, yields have to be higher.”
The rout doesn’t spell panic for everyone:
- The bond market is “finally working in the way it should work; it’s allocating capital efficiently,” Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, told CNBC. “It wasn’t doing that when the Fed was basically rigging the bond market by keeping the bond yield close to zero.” We’re back to market-driven interest rates.
- But that means that “bond vigilantes,” a term Yardeni coined in the 1980s for investors who sell government bonds in protest of fiscal policy, are freer to express their opinions. While they’re obviously concerned, Yardeni added that the bond yield wouldn’t be where it is if the economy weren’t doing well.
  Warsh Worries: Bond investors also have to do a lot more guesswork under a Kevin Warsh-led Fed. The new chair has indicated that FOMC members should share less about their thought process and is moving away from guidance. A recent report from Bloomberg Intelligence suggested that the Fed may eliminate the dot plot chart shared after FOMC meetings that shows members’ projections of interest-rate paths.
Written by Mallika Mitra
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Photo via BluSky AI
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Communities across the country are pushing back on data centers. Traditional facilities drain local water supplies, strain power grids, and require large land footprints. That resistance is slowing an already constrained infrastructure buildout.
BluSky AI took a different approach. Their SkyMod prefabricated AI compute centers deploy in months, not years, use less power, require little to no water, and fit onto smaller footprints.
This puts BluSky AI in a unique position within the market. They’re one of the few companies addressing community concerns while keeping infrastructure builds moving forward as demand accelerates faster than traditional builders can respond.
Tomorrow is the final day to become an early-stage investor at $5/share.
Invest in BluSky AI today before the share price changes after 8/20.*
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Make the rent check payable to Goldman Sachs, but take care of everything else yourself.
On Tuesday, the Wall Street titan announced it has agreed to acquire so-called “hands-off” commercial real estate landlord LCN Capital Partners in a transaction potentially worth as much as $410 million. It’s the second deal Goldman has struck in a week focused on pushing the boundaries of its already gargantuan $4 trillion asset-management unit.
Leased But Not Least
Operating as a “hands-off” landlord is exactly what it sounds like: LCN leases properties to commercial clients (across industrial, office, retail and other spaces), and the clients are then responsible for all other expenses, such as repairs, insurance and even property taxes. It’s what the real estate world calls “triple-net” leases, and LCN finds its properties and tenants partly through sale-leaseback agreements (buying a property and renting it back to the original owner). The arrangement has its perks for tenants, namely the ability to keep property off their balance sheets and, occasionally, lower rents in exchange for picking up all the extra expenses.
For the triple-net landlords, the arrangement offers a steady income stream from reliable corporate tenants. Which in turn creates more spokes for Goldman to add to its vast and ever-evolving flywheel:
- For starters, Goldman would be able to offer triple-net leases to existing corporate banking clients, who typically carry high credit and could provide predictable income streams.
- Those properties and steady returns could then be packaged as investment funds for Goldman to pitch to high-net-worth clients and institutional investors. LCN has raised 10 funds since it was founded in 2011 by a Goldman veteran, and it has reported annual net cash-on-cash returns of nearly 11%.
“LCN’s differentiated platform is highly attractive for our Asset & Wealth Management clients who want diversified sources of returns and offers corporate clients innovative capital solutions,” Goldman CEO David Solomon said in a statement.
My Name Is Neos: Finding new investment platforms has become a bit of a theme for Goldman. In June, the bank launched a tokenized real estate fund on the blockchain. Last week, it announced a $2.3 billion deal for ETF platform Neos, and late last year, it agreed to buy another ETF platform, Innovator Capital Management, for $2 billion and venture capital firm Industry Ventures for about $1 billion. Looks like Solomon knows late-night DJ sets can only go so far as a diversified income stream.
Written by Brian Boyle
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Photo via Range
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You made some good decisions, and the earnings in your portfolio prove it. But without a solid plan, taxes take their share of that return, market up or down. Range’s CFPs and CPAs show you how tax-loss harvesting can limit the taxman’s damage, live August 20. Save your seat.
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Photo via John Angelillo/UPI/Newscom
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Reddit became the second social media company in the S&P 500 yesterday, joining Meta.
S&P Dow Jones Indices announced on Thursday that Reddit would replace AvalonBay Communities, a real estate investment trust being acquired by fellow S&P member Equity Residential.
Investors initially upvoted Reddit’s stock ahead of the social platform joining the S&P 500. But sentiment switched not long afterward as concerns mounted about the company and its little alien mascot Snoo’s ability to perform in the big leagues.
Adding ‘Reddit’ to Every Google Search
Reddit has been the so-called “front page of the internet” since 2005, but it became more than a platform for perusing memes in the past couple of years. As companies tried to make their AI chatbots sound more human, Reddit posts, from users DoorDashing Dunkin’ to their wife’s workplace on r/CasualConversation to those having a ghost hitch a ride with them on r/Paranormal, have become a blueprint for the human experience.
And unlike some other sites, AI’s scraping happened with Reddit’s permission:
- Reddit got cozy with AI in 2024, striking lucrative deals with both Google and OpenAI to train their AI models on r/creepypasta posts. Those deals padded Reddit’s earnings, which are mainly fueled by ads. The social platform at the end of July reported the eighth straight quarter of revenue rising more than 60%, led by its ad biz. Its “Other revenue” category, which includes data-licensing deals, grew 24%.
- But now investors are afraid AI will do more harm to Reddit’s bottom line than good. While reporting its second-quarter performance, Reddit called search referrals “choppy.” CEO Steve Huffman pointed to Google’s AI overviews as pulling traffic away from Reddit’s site. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Reddit could be considering ending its $60 million Google deal.
Reddit Stories or AI Summaries? Reddit has always struggled to keep its content on its site, where it can bring in ad dollars, as users repeat its posts word-for-word on TikTok or upload screenshots of its posts to Instagram. Google’s AI overviews are the latest example of that problem. Blocking AI chatbots, like publications including The New York Times and Reuters have done, could either keep more users on Reddit or just diminish the posts’ visibility and drive people to other sources.
Written by Jamie Wilde
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- Anti-Cheat Code: OpenAI launched a “ChatGPT for Teens” with safety features for users under 18, including “responsible homework reminders” when it detects a student cutting corners on assignments.
- Just Sell It: Nike’s stock hit the lowest level in more than a decade as investors turned sour on the struggling sneaker company’s turnaround plans.
- Your Morning Routine Is Missing Something Crucial. Start each day with The Hustle’s addictive 5-minute briefing that cuts through the noise to deliver only the business and tech stories that actually impact your world, loved by 1.5M+ readers. Subscribe today.
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