The Fed raised rates for the first time since 2023, unanimously, and most officials expect to do it again — On September 16, 2026 the Federal Open Market Committee voted 12-0 to raise the federal funds target by 25 basis points to 3.75%–4.00%. Chair Kevin Warsh said inflation had been “too high for too long” and that while the Fed cannot stop an oil shock, it has a role in preventing relative price changes from having second- and third-order effects. Sixteen of eighteen participants pencilled in at least one more increase this year; four saw two.

A hiking cycle that begins with energy near war-time highs, US diesel at a record and the yield curve already at multi-year highs is a different regime from the one most balance sheets were financed under. The sectors that carried the most floating-rate or refinancing exposure into 2026 — commercial real estate, leveraged small caps, private credit borrowers — are where a second hike would show up first.

Iran says it has agreed a plan with Oman to reopen the Strait of Hormuz; the argument is over tolls — Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi, arriving in Beijing on September 16–17, 2026, said the June memorandum with the United States “remains in force” and that Iran “has already agreed with Oman on a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.” Russia’s foreign ministry said a postponed Gulf–Iran meeting would convene in Oman within days. The unresolved point is Iran’s demand for a new regime governing the strait that includes charges for passage, which Oman opposes and the US has called unacceptable. Meanwhile the EIA’s national average retail diesel price reached $6.285 a gallon for the week of September 14, 2026, another record, and crude tanker earnings were reported at fresh highs.

Almost everything in energy, shipping and inflation-sensitive assets is priced for the strait staying largely shut. A reopening, even a partial or tolled one, would reverse a set of trades that have run for six months, and the question worth preparing for is which of them are priced for permanence: record tanker rates, refiner crack spreads, coal and LNG substitution, and the rate path the Fed has just started on.

Russia banned sulfuric acid exports through the end of 2026 — Prime Minister Mishustin signed a resolution on September 12, 2026 prohibiting exports of sulfuric acid, effective ten days after publication and running to December 31, 2026, with exceptions for transit cargo, intergovernmental agreements and case-by-case government decisions. The stated purpose is to guarantee supply to domestic fertilizer producers and industry. China’s own halt on sulfuric acid exports already runs through year-end, and the Strait of Hormuz disruption has removed roughly 45% of seaborne sulfur trade.

Sulfuric acid is the working fluid of phosphate fertilizer, copper leaching, nickel HPAL and uranium processing, and every large exporter has now pulled out of the market at once. The producers that matter in this configuration are the ones who make acid as a byproduct of smelting or refining in importing regions and sell it merchant, and the losers are the processing chains, particularly Indonesian HPAL nickel, that were built on cheap imported acid.

The Kremlin placed Nestlé’s Russian business under state administration — A decree signed by President Putin late on September 17, 2026 transferred the Russian operations of Nestlé, the French retailer Auchan, the former Leroy Merlin chain now trading as Lemana Pro, and logistics group FM Logistic to temporary administration under LEV Management, a company created at the end of 2025 and headed by a Russian interior ministry general with no known business record. Nestlé said it was assessing its options. Previous temporary administrations — Danone, Carlsberg, Fortum — have generally ended in transfer to Kremlin-linked owners.

The direct financial effect on Nestlé is small relative to its size. The larger point is that the remaining Western consumer companies still operating in Russia have just been told the price of staying, at the same moment that their peers who exited in 2022 have already taken the write-downs — the divergence in how the two groups are treated by the market from here is the thing to watch.

NASA will pay to put Starliner on a second rocket — Ars Technica reported on September 17, 2026 that NASA intends to order two more crewed Starliner missions from Boeing, pay part of the cost of fixing the capsule’s thruster problems, and fund certification of an additional launch vehicle for it, with a likely competition between United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn. Starliner currently flies only on Atlas V, which uses Russian-built engines and has six vehicles left: one for the uncrewed Starliner-1 test and five for crewed flights.

Neither Blue Origin nor ULA is directly investable, and Boeing’s exposure is a rounding error, so the expression is indirect: a crew-rated second rocket is a multi-year certification program that pays engine, structures and avionics suppliers, and it is a signal that NASA is willing to fund redundancy to SpaceX at a cost rather than accept a single provider.

The European Commission proposed banning social media accounts for children under 13 and requiring certified age verification for everyone — The EU Kids Act, adopted as a proposal on September 17, 2026, would bar under-13s from social media, allow 13- and 14-year-olds only parent-supervised accounts, and require platforms to verify age at account creation through an EU-wide age-verification app or national equivalents. Within six months of the rules applying, platforms would have to check existing accounts and disable those belonging to under-15s or whose age cannot be verified. It now goes to the Parliament and Council.

If it passes in anything like this form, every major platform has to age-verify its entire European user base, not just new sign-ups, which is a very large procurement of identity-verification capacity on a fixed schedule. The listed identity-verification vendors are few, and the effect on platform ad inventory from disabling unverifiable accounts is a second-order question nobody has sized.

EPA proposed to rescind every remaining greenhouse-gas standard for power plants — Administrator Zeldin signed a final partial repeal of the 2024 carbon pollution standards for fossil-fuel power plants on September 14, 2026 and, alongside it, a proposal published in the Federal Register on September 17 (91 FR 59002) to rescind all remaining power-plant GHG standards and to find that Section 111 of the Clean Air Act does not authorize EPA to regulate them for climate reasons at all. EPA claims $310 billion of savings between 2026 and 2047. Comments are due by November 2, 2026.

The retirement dates of the US coal fleet are already being pushed out by gas prices; this removes the federal rule that would otherwise have forced them. The consequences run through coal producers, the railroads that haul coal, and the emissions-control and carbon-capture vendors whose order books assumed the 2024 rule.

Pampa Energía approved a US$2.7 billion urea plant, the largest in Latin America — Argentina’s Pampa Energía (NYSE: PAM) took a final investment decision on a 6,000-tonne-a-day, 2.1-million-tonne-a-year granular urea complex at Bahía Blanca, fed by Vaca Muerta shale gas, after the project was admitted to the RIGI large-investment regime in September 2026. Construction is expected to take about 42 months, with production targeted for 2029.

Argentina, one of the world’s largest grain exporters, imports most of its nitrogen fertilizer. A domestic urea plant built on some of the cheapest gas outside the Gulf and the US, arriving as European ammonia plants idle on gas costs, is a durable change in where nitrogen is made — a 2029 story, but one with a firm date and a listed owner.

Bayan Resources’ founder is selling 30% of the company, five days after declaring force majeure — Low Tuck Kwong and his daughter Elaine Low signed a conditional agreement on September 16, 2026 to sell 10 billion shares, a 30% stake in Bayan Resources, to PT Jhonlin Baratama, controlled by the Indonesian businessman Haji Isam. The price was not disclosed and completion depends on conditions precedent. On September 11, Bayan had declared force majeure at three subsidiaries because the energy ministry had not approved revisions to their 2026 mining quotas.

Indonesia’s third-largest coal producer changing hands in part to a politically connected domestic buyer, in the same fortnight the state showed it can stop the company’s cargoes with a permit, is either a coincidence or the mechanism by which a permit gate turns into a change of ownership. Which of those it is matters for every other Indonesian producer with an offshore or minority-foreign shareholder base.

Amaero set terms for a Nasdaq IPO of a US titanium-powder maker — Amaero Inc. filed an amended S-1 on September 18, 2026 for a 7.46-million-share offering raising roughly US$52.6 million, led by Stifel with Baird and Lake Street, under the ticker AMRO. The company, which has traded on the Australian exchange, makes spherical titanium and refractory alloy powders for additive manufacturing at a Tennessee plant and resumed titanium powder production in July 2026 after a safety review.

It is a small deal, but it is a US-listed pure play on the metal powders that defense additive manufacturing runs on, arriving in the same month the Pentagon put US$450 million into a domestic tungsten converter and the Commerce Department locked tungsten scrap inside the country. Whether that policy tailwind reaches a company this size is the question the offering will answer.

Lucid and Bolt agreed to deploy at least 25,000 autonomous vehicles across Europe — Announced September 17, 2026: Bolt, the Estonian ride-hailing company, will own and operate a fleet of at least 25,000 Level-4 autonomous Lucid vehicles built on Lucid’s midsize platform with Nvidia’s Hyperion architecture, co-developing the platform with Lucid. Bolt’s stated target is 100,000 autonomous vehicles by 2035. Lucid shares rose on the news.

The deal pairs a US electric-vehicle maker that needs volume with a European operator that is not Uber, and it puts Nvidia’s driving stack, rather than the Nuro system used in Lucid’s US arrangement with Uber, at the centre of the European fleet. The overlooked party is whoever finances 25,000 owned vehicles for a private ride-hailing company; fleet financing at that scale is a market of its own.