The Federal Reserve’s next rate decision may come down to inflation readings due this week, with investors watching Thursday’s August Producer Price Index and Friday’s Consumer Price Index for clues on how the central bank will interpret the path of Personal Consumption Expenditures inflation. According to the report, the debate in markets is still split between another rate hike and a hold, and the margin separating those two outcomes may be only a few hundredths of a percentage point. Krishna Guha, vice chairman of Evercore ISI, said the decision will depend mainly on inflation data and, to some extent, on the market expectations that take shape after the releases. He said a core PCE monthly increase around 0.21% or 0.22% could keep the Federal Open Market Committee on hold, while a print closer to 0.23% or 0.24% would likely tilt it toward a hike. He also called a policy judgment built on a 0.01-percentage-point distinction “ridiculous.” The picture is complicated by divisions among Fed officials, expected revisions to PCE data, and political pressure from Donald Trump. Markets were pricing the odds of a rate hike at about 60% as of Tuesday, while Kevin Warsh’s role heading into the Sept. 16 meeting is seen as especially important.

A stronger-than-expected U.S. nonfarm payrolls report reignited talk of another Federal Reserve rate hike, but futures pricing has yet to show a decisive change. According to CME FedWatch, the probability of a 25-basis-point increase at the Sept. 16 meeting, which would lift the policy rate to a 3.75%-4% range, stood at 58% as of Monday, almost unchanged from a week earlier. The immediate market reaction was sharp. Bitcoin fell from $81,300 to $78,700 within two hours after the data release, a drop of about 3.2%, while the yield on the 2-year U.S. Treasury rose from 4.36% to 4.42%. Still, the article argues that the more important signal lies in federal funds futures, where large banks, hedge funds and institutional traders place real money bets. The report says one payroll print is not enough to overturn the broader macro view, especially when other indicators such as consumer confidence, manufacturing PMI and the unemployment trend have not strengthened at the same time. It also points to Sept. 11 U.S. inflation data and the Sept. 16 Fed meeting as the next two dates most likely to reshape rate expectations, with Bitcoin’s latest pullback described as a short-term reaction rather than a structural shift for crypto markets.

Goldman Sachs said in its Aug. 31 month-end market intelligence report that the key shift in August was not headline market moves, but earnings catching up with valuations. The bank said the S&P 500 rose about 2.5% during the month, with nearly all of that gain coming in the first two trading days, while the 10-year Treasury yield ended the month only 5 basis points higher and oil was little changed. In contrast, gold rose 9%, silver gained 22%, and Bitcoin climbed 25%. The report said second-quarter earnings season came in stronger and broader than expected. Median S&P 500 earnings per share grew 14%, while the index’s forward price-to-earnings ratio stayed at 20x. With the S&P 500 up 12% year to date, Goldman argued that earnings growth, rather than multiple expansion, absorbed the rise in share prices. The bank also said that excluding AI infrastructure companies, the rest of the market posted the fastest earnings growth of the current cycle, a sign that the profit recovery is spreading. At the macro level, Goldman said policy uncertainty increased after Warsh’s hawkish Jackson Hole debut pushed the probability of a September rate hike above 50%, even as Goldman economists still expect August core CPI and core PCE to rise about 0.2% month on month and do not expect a hike. The bank said investors are now more sensitive to incoming data, with ISM, payrolls, CPI, and PCE likely to set the tone in September.

WuBlockchain’s latest roundup pulls together a dense mix of crypto, macro and enforcement developments. The daily highlights include European Central Bank executive board member Isabel Schnabel calling for central bank money to be brought onto blockchain infrastructure, with the ECB set to launch the Pontes project next month and complete the Appia long-term architecture blueprint in 2028. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission also said former White House teleprompter operator Gabriel Perez was penalized for trading on non-public speech information, with more than $170,000 in disgorgement and penalties plus a three-year trading ban. The digest also covers a warning from New York state that AI is being used to amplify investment scams, citing FTC data showing 144,041 U.S. consumers reported investment fraud losses exceeding $8 billion in 2025. In markets, Solana meme token Trump Digital Gold plunged more than 95% in one minute, while GoPlus Security said the developer’s funding could be traced to KuCoin and that related operator wallets were funded through Binance. The weekly Top 10 spans Arthur Hayes’ view that a new Bitcoin bull cycle has begun, BlackRock’s framing of Bitcoin as a fiscal-risk hedge, Treasury buyback discussions, Coinbase’s AiFi product stack, Solana emission proposals, Uniswap’s AMM thesis, Trump-linked crypto losses, Iran-related sanctions, and a record $44.9 billion in on-chain RWA market value excluding stablecoins.

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh used his Jackson Hole debut to lay out a disciplined, inflation-first policy framework and a broad critique of routine forward guidance. In a speech titled “In Our Time,” Warsh said the U.S. economy and labor market remain resilient, financial conditions are hard to describe as meaningfully restrictive, and inflation is still well above the Fed’s 2% goal. He said recent summer CPI and PCE readings came in better than expected, but not enough to show a meaningful improvement in the underlying inflation trend. A major part of the speech focused on communication strategy. Warsh argued that forward guidance was necessary during crisis periods but should be limited in normal times because it can mislead markets, constrain policymakers, and create a “hall-of-mirrors problem” in which markets trade on Fed signals while the Fed looks back at market prices for guidance. He also declined to offer a mechanical reaction function, saying the economy is too complex and changing too quickly for that approach. Warsh also spent considerable time on artificial intelligence, calling it a possible new factor of production and outlining questions the Fed is studying on productivity, labor, capital intensity, token pricing, and market structure. After the speech, CME FedWatch showed the implied probability of a September rate hike rising to nearly 60% from 35% a day earlier, while spot gold fell $50 to around $4,550 an ounce.

WuBlockchain’s weekly roundup put macro liquidity and crypto market structure at the center of the conversation, with several stories tying US fiscal policy to Bitcoin’s recent strength. Arthur Hayes argued in a new essay that the US Treasury, under Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, is effectively creating more dollar liquidity through long-dated Treasury buybacks and could go further if 10-year yields move above 5%. He said Bitcoin has already entered a new bull cycle, while GSR and Wintermute both pointed to fresh external capital, large ETF inflows, and heavy short liquidations as key drivers behind the move. The list also highlighted BlackRock’s view that rising US debt and fiscal deficits are strengthening Bitcoin’s role as a hedge against fiscal risk, alongside a CNBC report that the Treasury is considering using about $950 billion from the Treasury General Account to support expanded long-term debt buybacks. Elsewhere, Coinbase outlined its AI finance, or AiFi, stack; Solana’s SIMD-550 and SIMD-553 proposals were framed as measures that could reduce issuance by $1.4 billion to $1.5 billion over six years; and Uniswap founder Hayden Adams argued AMMs now have a clearer route to becoming core market infrastructure. On the political and regulatory side, the roundup covered an investigation into Aqua 1 Foundation backer Guren Zhou, new US sanctions covering digital assets tied to Iran, and a Public Citizen report saying Trump-linked crypto businesses have caused at least $4.7 billion in investor losses since 2022. The final item noted that on-chain RWA market capitalization, excluding stablecoins, has reached a record $44.9 billion.

U.S. stock index futures lacked clear direction in early trading Friday, Aug. 28, as investors awaited a closely watched speech from Federal Reserve Chair Woshi. Tech investors began taking profits after Nvidia (NVDA.O) helped drive gains the previous day. Societe Generale analyst Rajappa said this week's core PCE data signaled that inflation is proving stickier than expected, adding that the data this year points to a need for policy action soon. Historically, the Fed chair's Jackson Hole speech has not been a major catalyst for equities; since 2000, the S&P 500 has averaged a move of just 0.4% in the week after the symposium without a broader monetary policy shift. Apollo Management chief economist Torsten Slok expects no forward guidance from Woshi on Friday, but he said long-term yields could move, with the Fed chair's views on inflation, unemployment and the neutral rate likely to drive the long end of the yield curve.

Jackson Hole is no longer only a central banking event in the traditional sense. Ahead of the Kansas City Fed’s annual symposium, a separate Wyoming Blockchain Symposium brought roughly 500 executives, investors, and lawmakers to the Four Seasons to discuss digital assets, while about 120 central bankers, economists, and policy officials were set to gather 35 miles away at Jackson Lake Lodge for a meeting themed around financial innovation and its implications for payments and policy. The shift matters because the Federal Reserve system has now explicitly placed crypto assets, stablecoins, instant payments, and other digital payment systems into the same policy conversation. The article argues that stablecoins are the clearest bridge between the two worlds. For users, they function as dollars that move easily on-chain. For central banks, they are privately issued monetary instruments backed by reserves such as short-term Treasurys and cash, tying them to questions around public debt, bank deposits, convertibility, payment access, and the global role of the dollar. BIS data cited in the piece put stablecoin market capitalization at about $320 billion as of the end of May, with roughly $28 trillion in 2025 transaction volume before adjustments for transfers between wallets controlled by the same entity. Bitcoin, by contrast, still trades on Jackson Hole’s older logic: rates, liquidity, and policy expectations. That leaves Kevin Warsh’s scheduled Friday speech, July PCE data, and the Treasury’s larger buyback operations as immediate signals for risk assets, even if blockchain itself gets little stage time.