The Trade Room

Kevin Warsh skips submitting his own dot at his first FOMC meeting as Fed chair, and Wall Street's clean story about wider bank margins and stronger loan growth assumes a rate path that no longer exists. Blake and August, tracking bank earnings and Federal Reserve policy, unpack what former Fed examiners see buried in commercial real estate reserve disclosures across bank 10-Q filings. They ask ho...

Wall Street priced a 77% probability of at least one Fed rate hike by year-end after Kevin Warsh's June 17 press conference, but Brookings senior fellow Robin Brooks called the entire performance largely performative — and the data may be on his side. Blake and August examine whether the market read Warsh's intent or just his theater, working through the mechanics of a 130-word stripped policy sta...

Alan Greenspan dies at 100 the same week Kevin Warsh issues a 130-word Fed statement — the shortest since Greenspan's own 128-word statement in January 2002 — and almost no one in the obituary cycle connects the two. Blake and August break down what that collision reveals about the Fed's communication architecture, examining the 1994 rate shock that crashed the Dow 2.5 percent and wiped $600 billi...

The rate hold is not the story. On June 16, 2026, Kevin Warsh chairs his first FOMC meeting, and his press conference at 2:30 this afternoon could retire the dot plot — the signal that has anchored more than $10 trillion in fixed income pricing since 2012 — while every headline focuses on the hold at 3.5 to 3.75 percent. Blake and August examine what Warsh's Greenspan-era opacity philosophy actual...

The SpaceX IPO priced at a fixed $135 with no bookbuild, a $1.77 trillion valuation on $18.7 billion of revenue, and a governance structure that gives Elon Musk 85.1% of the votes on 42% of the equity. Blake and August go line by line through the S-1 to separate what the roadshow sold from what the filing actually says. Starlink generates $11.4 billion in revenue at a 39% operating margin, but the...

Private credit's stress signals — BCRED's first monthly loss in three years, Ares capping redemptions after investors tried to pull 11.6% from a $10.7 billion fund — are being read as liquidity friction. Blake and August argue the redemption gates are not the story; what sits inside the funds is. Morgan Stanley estimates roughly 26% of private credit exposure sits in software. Agentic AI is now di...

Kevin Warsh takes over as Fed chair with a public commitment to eliminate the dot plot — and his first FOMC meeting on June 16th is a dot-plot meeting. The political narrative priced in a dovish pivot; the data handed him 3.8% CPI, 6.0% year-over-year PPI, and four dissents at the last meeting under Powell. Blake and August work through the full inflation stack Warsh inherited, then trace the mech...

SpaceX's S-1 reveals a company that swung from a $791 million profit in 2024 to a $4.94 billion net loss in 2025, and the conventional narrative — that this is simply Elon Musk consolidating his empire — skips the structural questions the filing actually raises. Blake and August are co-hosts of The Trade Room with no outside affiliation to SpaceX, xAI, or any party to the deal. How does xAI's valu...