There are mornings when the stock market wakes up worried about earnings. Other mornings, it worries about oil. Sometimes investors become obsessed with whatever artificial intelligence company has discovered a new way to spend $80 billion building something nobody can adequately explain. And then there are mornings like this one, when the bond market walks into the room, kicks its shoes onto the table and reminds everyone that it still has the ability to ruin the party. That is essentially what I am watching on September 24, 2026. U.S. stock futures are falling again as Treasury yields push into territory we haven't seen in years. Early Thursday morning, Dow futures were down roughly 0.3%, S&P 500 futures were off about 0.5%, and Nasdaq-100 futures were falling around 0.7%. Those numbers were moving as the morning developed, but the message was fairly clear: investors were not exactly racing toward the opening bell with party hats. And I understand why. The benchmark 10-year T...
There are ambitious corporate investments, and then there is Masayoshi Son. Whenever I think the artificial-intelligence spending boom has finally reached a number large enough to make everyone involved reconsider their life choices, SoftBank shows up with another zero. This time, SoftBank Group is heading into the high-yield bond market looking to raise more than $11 billion, with the money helping finance its enormous push into artificial intelligence and, more specifically, its increasingly concentrated bet on OpenAI. And when I say “high-yield,” I am using the polite Wall Street terminology. We are talking about junk bonds. Lots of them. SoftBank is marketing approximately $10 billion of dollar-denominated debt along with €1 billion, or roughly $1.1 billion, of euro-denominated bonds. If completed at that size, the transaction would rank among the largest corporate high-yield bond offerings ever. That's impressive. It's also slightly terrifying. Because beneath all the exci...