美国财政部将扩大国债回购，单只规模或超40亿美元

Summary: We’re in the final weeks of summer, and the news is slow. Not much has changed in the economy. Retailers reported solid growth. AI spending continues. The Treasury Department’s intervention into bond markets was the news of the week.

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Macro

The US economy is a standout
“The United States was a standout, not just because of the World Cup, but actually because of the underlying fundamentals of the economy. Your callers earlier were talking about strong investment in infrastructure and AI and data centers, that’s hundreds of billions of dollars, but it’s really broader than that. It’s manufacturing, it’s energy, it’s pharma. It’s all the reshoring that’s coming into the country. So we think it’s pretty broad-based. You still have pretty high employment levels, wage growth, and GDP growing at 2%. Consumers are still spending, especially on experiences, and that’s the industry we’re really in. So we feel good about the United States continuing to grow.” - InterContinental Hotels Group () CEO Elie Maalouf

Consumer spending is resilient
“Certainly, the last couple of years, payments, while being strong and reflecting the resiliency of the U.S. consumer spending and some really attractive new sources of revenue, has been a little shy of the historical growth algorithm.” - Jack Henry & Associates () CFO Mimi Carsley

Bifurcation is real
“...that bifurcating consumer is real. So we still see very strong design sales. We still see large tickets. We see folks willing to invest in whole room solutions and upgrades and leathers and power and are still spending, and we’re seeing that channel grow. At the same time, we’ve been transparent around that; we’ve worked to sharpen some opening price points, again, not deep discount relative to some in our industry, but to enable people that it’s aspirational to get into the La-Z-Boy quality to give them that opportunity and some pared-down offerings. So we continue to work on both ends of that spectrum of that bifurcated consumer, and we’ll continue to stay close to that.” - La-Z-Boy () CEO Melinda Whittington

“...the K-shaped economy persists, though we did see some sequential improvement during the quarter. We drove comp growth across all income cohorts, which is encouraging, and our value proposition continues to resonate broadly. That said, the vast majority of our growth continues to be driven by our higher income members, which is consistent with what we’ve seen for some time now.” - BJ’s Wholesale Club () CEO Bob Eddy

Walmart is seeing relatively low inflation
“Bob, generally, we’ve seen a pretty low inflationary environment throughout the year. We’re between 1% and 2% in total. And the rollbacks, we think, can help over this quarter and the last few months. So generally not any big concerns right now on inflation. Fuel costs are probably the one thing that, of course, we’re watching because of the magnitude of it. And hopefully, those can come down over time.” - Walmart () CEO John Furner

Treasury is intervening in Treasury markets
“...we’re trying to signal that we think that this is a thinly traded area of the market, that we’re in August, and there’s been a lot of corporate issuance that’s influenced the market. And we believe that there are many underlying factors in turn that the market is not looking at, and we are going to make a market in these. We routinely do buybacks, and we’re going to increase the size of the buyback. And, you know, Sara, I would note that it could be more than the $4 billion per issue.” - U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent

International

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