Daily Briefing — August 14, 2026 | The S&P Tops 7,800 as a Week of Falling Rate-Hike Odds Closes Out

The S&P 500 closes above 7,800 for the first time ever after a soft July Producer Price Index report, capping a week that saw September rate-hike odds collapse from roughly 55% to around 34%. We cover the notable split within Thursday's PPI data, where wholesale goods prices actually fell even as services costs kept climbing, and GDS Wealth Management's read on why the Fed's real path to taming inflation runs through the Middle East rather than any single data print. We also cover oil's sharp Thursday drop amid a genuine, contested dispute over how much control the US actually has over the Strait of Hormuz, a mixed batch of AI-adjacent earnings from Cerebras, Applied Materials, and Super Micro Computer, Netflix's jump on a new Bill Ackman stake, and the yen's continued slide toward 160 against the dollar. We close with a preview of today's retail sales and University of Michigan consumer sentiment data, the final pieces of one of the most data-packed weeks of the summer. This episode is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.