The Rundown - Zuckerberg Rejects AI Slowdown, Fed Expected to Start Hiking Cycle

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Market update for September 16thLimited Time Promo: Sign up for a Public account, deposit $1,000 and get $100 in free stock (LINK)Follow us on Instagram (@TheRundownDaily) for bonus content and instant reactions.In today's episode, Zaid covers:Why the Fed’s expected rate hike may be the beginning of a new hiking cycleMark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang pushing back against calls for an industry-wide AI slowdownMeta’s plan for camera-free smart glasses as privacy concerns growThe Clarity Act failing in the Senate and triggers selloff across crypto stocksIntel and SK Hynix jumping on talks to manufacture memory chips in the U.S.J.B. Hunt getting hammered as surging fuel costs squeeze profitsHow malls became the best-performing sector in commercial real estate

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Wednesday, September 16th. In today's episode, we'll break down why the Fed is expected to raise interest rates for the first time since 2023. We'll also tell you why Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang are pushing back against calls to slow down AI. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why malls have been the best. best performing sector in commercial real estate. We get a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks took another hit on Tuesday with the S&P 500 dropping half a percent, while the NASDAQ fell by 0.8%.

The stock market is in a bit of a funk right now. It's dropped for six out of the last seven trading sessions as investors get more nervous about bond yields and oil prices and what the Fed is going to do today. The 10-year treasury yield touched 5.04% yesterday before closing right under 5%. But that was still the highest closed since July of 2007. The 30-year treasury yield is trading around 5.36%. Oil prices continued to jump yesterday. Brent crude is now trading near $108 a barrel because of supply disruption in the Middle East. And that's pushing up the cost of pumping gas at the pump. The national average in the U.S. is near $4.33 a gallon. And you know, as gas prices, keep climbing, that's hurting other sectors of the economy. We're already starting to see data that

higher gas prices and borrowing costs are hitting discretionary spending. For example, restaurant traffic dropped 2.4% from last August, and stocks like Wingstop, Kava, and Cheesecake Factory all fell more than 4% yesterday. And that brings me to the Fed meeting today. At 2 p.m. Eastern time today, the market is pricing in a 90% chance the Fed will announce a 25 basis point hike. This will be the first time the Fed has hiked interest rates since 2023. And the reason the market is expecting a rate hike is because of rising inflation. Now, as you guys know, the reason inflation is going up is because of energy prices going up from the supply shock from the Iran War.

But hiking interest rates isn't going to fix the oil supply issue. But what the Fed is hoping to do is that by raising rates, that's going to slow down consumer demand and stop the oil shock from spreading through the rest of the economy so that expensive oil doesn't turn into everything else. else getting expensive. So that's why the market is convinced the Fed will be hiking rates today. And I think the key question coming out of this Fed meeting is that will this just be a one-time hike or the start of another hiking cycle?

Looking back in history, the Fed has only done a one-and-done rate hike once, which was back in 1997. Usually the Fed likes to do multiple rate hikes. So I think that will be the key thing to listen to during Kevin Warsh's press conference today. Will he hint at more rate hikes moving forward? The bond market definitely thinks, though. markets are pricing in roughly one more rate hike by the end of this year

with potentially several more rate hikes coming by next summer. So we'll find out in a few short hours what the Fed decides to do. On a side note, how relieved do you think that Jerome Powell is right now that he's not the Fed chair anymore? Because the Fed isn't a pretty tricky spot. I also wonder how President Trump is going to react if the Fed does end up hiking interest rates. I'll be staying on top of all that today,

and I'll recap everything on tomorrow's show. I'll also try to post an instant reaction on the rundown's Instagram account, We'll put the link in the description. So follow us there for that and more market content. And if you're a first time listener of the show, you definitely picked a great time to join. Definitely get subscribed to the podcast if you haven't already. And tune in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines, starting with Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang.

Zuck and Jensen weighed in on the calls for an AI slowdown by Anthropic CEO Dario Amade and others earlier this week. And shocker, they don't seem to agree. On Monday, Jensen said that he believes that the market forces are already there and that we don't need any new laws or any new regulations when it comes to AI. Now, keep in mind, Jensen is the CEO of a company that sells AI chips, so an AI slowdown would be bad for business. But he's not the only one that feels that way about an AI slowdown. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg were a long post on X on Tuesday night,

pretty much saying the same thing. I gotta say the post was pretty solid. Now, he didn't name drop Anthropic or Dario specifically, but he did say that every AI lab should be responsible for their own safety. He said these labs are incentivized to be safe because AI labs risk significant liability if their models cause harm. He even gave the example that Meta actually delayed their Meta Muse agent app for several months because of safety and security concerns. But meta didn't demand Anthropic, OpenAI, and everybody else to stop developing while they figured things out. So I thought that Zuck made a good point. You know, if Anthropic thinks that their next model is too dangerous,

well, maybe Anthropic should slow down themselves. But asking every competitor to slow down, I mean, that doesn't make any sense. Now, Zuck did say he supports more independent safety evaluators looking into these models, so he's not arguing that AI safety doesn't matter. He just doesn't think there needs to be any further AI regulation. So like I said on Monday, I think it's going to be business as usual when it comes to AI and development. I did see an interesting theory that Anthropic, Open AI, and SpaceX might have hit a plateau when it comes to AI model capabilities,

but they don't want to admit that because that could hurt their valuation, and that's why they're framing this whole narrative of purposely slowing down in the name of safety. It's actually not a bad theory. One more quick news on meta. Meta has their MetaConnect conference next week, and the information is reporting that the company is planning to launch a new pair of smart glasses called Luna that has no cameras on them. There's been a lot of backlash recently about cameras on meta's smart glasses

and how they're really creepy. So meta is planning to take the cameras out and just put a smart AI model on their glasses with speakers and a microphone so you can talk to it. So yeah, they're trying to make it a little bit less creepy. By the way, meta stock is up nearly 20% in the past month, which is the best performing stock out of the Mac 7.

Let's shift gears and talk about crypto real quick. We got an update from yesterday's show. I told you guys there was a critical procedural vote in the Senate about the Clarity Act, which would have provided a better regulatory framework for the crypto industry. Well, as expected, it did not pass. That bill needed 60 votes and it only got 49.

So this is a pretty major setback for the crypto industry. And the market reaction was ugly. Coinbase stock fell as much as 12% yesterday. And Circle was down 13%. Bitcoin itself dropped more than 5% at one point, briefly falling below $75,000. So this is going to add some uncertainty to the crypto industry again. That said, this isn't the end of crypto regulation. Both the SEC and CFTC have signaled.

they'll continue to write rules about crypto even without Congress passing the Clarity Act. So we'll see what ends up happening. I am really curious to see how Bitcoin behaves over the next few weeks with this setback and with yields rising in the Fed looking to raise rates. It could get pretty ugly in the crypto space over the next few weeks. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Intel and SK-Hinakes are both up this morning after Reuters reported that two companies are discussing a pretty interesting chip manufacturing deal.

S.K. Hynix is a Korean company. They're one of the biggest memory chip makers in the world, and they're the leading supplier of HBM, which is high bandwidth memory that sits next to Nvidia GPUs inside AI servers. And right now, there is a huge shortage of memory as AI data center buildout keeps accelerating. It's where the price of RAM costs more than rent these days. Well, S.K. Hynakes is now considering manufacturing memory chips

in the U.S. for the first time ever. option being discussed is SK Hynix leasing a part of Intel's massive chip factory in Ohio. Another option being fluttered out there is some kind of joint venture between Intel, SK Heinigs, and a hyperscaler that wants to lock in memory supply. Now, these talks are still early. Nothing has been finalized, but this could be a win-win for all sides. So for Intel, they've spent years and billions of dollars trying to turn their foundry business into a serious competitor to TSMC.

If they're able to get SK-Hinigs into one of their factories, that would give Intel a major customer and help fill capacity at their Ohio complex, which has already been delayed until 2030. And this can be a big win for SK Heinzik's to get the U.S. government off their back. Commerce Secretary Howard Ludnik has threatened up to a 100% tariff on Korean chipmakers who don't build in the U.S. Again, talks are still early, but the market likes what they heard. Both Intel and S.K. Hynakes are up around 3% this morning at the time of this recording. Now, on the flip side, shares of J.B. Hunt are getting hammered this morning after the trucking company CFO issued a warning about rising costs. You know, one of the big problems right

now is the cost of diesel. A gallon of diesel now cost over $6 a gallon. And that's why operating expenses that J.B. Hunt are rising faster than they can raise prices on their customers. Management now expects earnings to drop 5 to 10 percent from Q2 to Q3. Wall Street analysts had been expecting earnings to grow. And by the way, fuel isn't the only problem. J.B. Hunt is also having to hire more truck drivers, which is expected to add about $25 million in cost this quarter. So because of that warning, J.B. Hunt stock is taken ahead. It's down around 11% this morning at the time of this recording. You know, this is a great example of how rising oil prices are having a direct impact across the economy, and it could start showing up in corporate earnings. So Q3 earnings season could be very

interesting. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Malls have been the best performing asset in commercial real estate this year. According to the real estate analytics firm Green Street, mall values are up 13% over the past 12 months, which makes malls the best performing sector in commercial real estate, outperforming all 10 other major property categories like apartments, warehouses, and even data centers. And you can even see that in the stock market, shares of Simon Property Group, which is the largest mall owner in the U.S., their stock hit a record high in July for the first time since 2016. And even CBL properties, which literally went through bankruptcy after the pandemic, has seen their stock jump 48% this year.

So, yeah, malls are making a comeback, which is crazy to think because not too long ago, everyone thought that malls were dead because Amazon and e-commerce had killed them. Now, a big reason that malls are made a comeback is because there are fewer malls these days. About 200 malls have closed in the U.S. since 2008. Most of those malls were in bad locations or poor performing. So today, there are about 900 malls operating across the U.S. and those malls that survive have less competition. Plus, malls these days are just getting better. Mall owners have gotten smarter about what they put inside these malls.

Instead of relying on department stores like Macy's and J.C. Penny, which no one shops that anymore, malls are now adding luxury brands and popular restaurants and entertainment options like kid play places and movie theaters. And because these malls are getting better, younger people are actually going back to malls to socialize and hang out again, which, you know, I love to see. You know, I'm in my mid-30s now, and one of my core experiences as a teenager was hanging out with my friends at the mall. You just can't replace that experience with Amazon, you know? Let me know what you guys think.

Do you think that malls are back? I mean, I got to say, anecdotally speaking, every time I go to a mall these days, it seems to be packed. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Thank you guys so much for listening, watching, and commenting. Shout out to Mike and V for all the work. behind the scenes. And we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.