Oil came off its highs and the bond market is being written up as having found its footing. On Friday's closes the two-year fell six basis points and the thirty-year rose two, to the highest level of the reintroduced series. A curve that was the flattest of the year on Monday ended the week fifteen basis points steeper. Wednesday brings the August PCE print and Micron's fourth quarter in the same session.
The AI build-out has created construction jobs, and the federal data says they are smaller in number and narrower in distribution than either side of the argument claims. Electrical contractors added 42,000 people in a year. Power and communication line construction — the trade that builds the interconnection — lost 1,500. And the count of projects stopped by local opposition is roughly double the figure now being quoted.
The AI build-out is financed in quarters and delivered in half-decades. Berkeley Lab's queue data, GE Vernova's order book and PJM's last capacity auction describe the same bottleneck from three directions, and not one of the three is getting shorter.
This desk argued yesterday morning that September's Treasury sell-off was entirely a front-end event. Wednesday's close ended that: the thirty-year added eleven basis points, its equal-largest move of the year. The reported comparison with 2004 is still wrong, for an instructive reason.
Legislators have moved from asking data centres about electricity to asking them about water, and the disclosure requests are arriving first.
Communities courting computing infrastructure are weighing tax revenue against power, water, and the political limits of industrial land use.