Good Afternoon. On this day in 1961, East German forces began sealing Berlin’s sector border with roadblocks and barbed wire, starting the barrier that would divide the city for 28 years.

Wall Street borrowed the image today: one inflation barrier weakened, but it didn’t disappear. Wholesale prices went nowhere in July, oil eased, and stocks leaned toward records, yet annual producer inflation and borrowing costs still leave businesses with plenty to climb.

Today’s edition is about the difference between relief and resolution. Cheaper energy can help margins, a softer labor market can help interest rates, and long-term technology contracts can help planning.

None of those fixes the next quarter by itself, but they’re useful clues about where pressure may be moving next.

—Rosie, Wyatt, Evan & Conor

🔥 What’s Hot: 🔥

🥶 What’s Not: 🥶

🔢 Big number: 4.7%. That’s how much the broad U.S. producer-price index rose over the year through July, even though it didn’t increase at all during the month. The monthly pause is welcome; the annual level explains why the Federal Reserve still can’t declare victory.

The inflation story finally offered businesses a calmer monthly reading, but it didn’t hand the Federal Reserve an all-clear. July’s broad producer-price index was unchanged, which means wholesale costs stopped rising for a month even as the year-over-year rate stayed uncomfortably high.

The news: Final-demand prices were flat in July after June’s revised 0.1% decline, while the annual rate reached 4.7%. Goods prices fell 0.7% because energy dropped 3.1% and food declined 0.9%, but services rose 0.2%. The less volatile measure excluding food, energy, and trade services increased 0.4%, so the underlying picture hasn’t cooled as quickly as the headline. Construction costs also rose 2.2%, a reminder that the relief won’t land evenly across industries.

What’s next: Businesses should watch whether cheaper fuel and goods move into freight, packaging, and supplier invoices instead of merely improving vendor margins. The Fed will also care about service categories that feed its preferred inflation gauge, including portfolio-management fees, which jumped 6.5%. One flat month can ease the pressure, but it can’t yet prove that companies have regained predictable input costs.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Stocks treated the wholesale report as permission to lean into growth again, but they didn’t celebrate indiscriminately. Falling Treasury yields helped rate-sensitive corners, while a sharp post-earnings decline at one networking giant showed that strong demand still needs to arrive with believable margins.

The news: The S&P 500 was up close to 0.7% late in the session, the Nasdaq 100 gained close to 1.2%, and the Dow was roughly flat. The 10-year Treasury yield fell toward 4.6% from about 4.7%, while Brent crude slipped as traders weighed softer U.S. fuel demand. Rate-cut expectations improved after the producer-price release, but they didn’t return to last week’s optimism because annual inflation remains sticky. Real-estate shares benefited from lower yields, while Cisco’s decline kept the Dow from joining the broader rally.

Big picture: This wasn’t a simple risk-on day; it was a repricing of where pressure sits. Lower yields help long-duration assets, housing-linked businesses, and companies that depend on financing. Higher annual producer inflation still threatens margins and keeps the Fed cautious. The useful signal isn’t that everything got easier—it’s that energy and borrowing pressure eased enough to reward businesses with durable growth.

Source: Associated Press

Cisco delivered the kind of sales and AI-order growth executives usually want to discuss for days. Investors focused instead on what future profitability may require, and the shares fell close to 9.0% despite results that cleared the company’s own targets.

The news: Fiscal fourth-quarter revenue rose 18% to $17.3 billion, while adjusted earnings reached $1.22 a share. Product orders grew 35%, and AI-infrastructure orders from large cloud customers hit $4 billion during the quarter, lifting the full-year total to $9.3 billion. Cisco expects roughly $7.5 billion of AI-related revenue in fiscal 2027, but the market’s reaction suggests those sales won’t receive an automatic premium if component costs or product mix pull on margins. The company guided first-quarter revenue to $18.0 billion to $18.2 billion.

Bottom line: AI demand isn’t the disputed part of this story; the conversion from orders to profitable revenue is. Cisco’s networking scale gives it a seat at the infrastructure buildout, yet customers, suppliers, and product mix determine how much value reaches shareholders. Managers across the technology supply chain should prepare for the same question: growth can be excellent, but what does it cost to deliver?

Source: Cisco

Sandisk used its investor day to make AI storage feel less like a forecast and more like a production plan. The important shift wasn’t another enthusiastic demand estimate; it was the company’s attempt to pair future capacity with customer commitments before the bits leave the factory.

The news: Management said the market for enterprise data-center flash could reach 1.2 zettabytes by 2030. Its newer customer-agreement model now covers eight customers and is expected to account for about half of the company’s bits in fiscal 2027 and roughly two-thirds in fiscal 2028. Those arrangements can improve demand visibility and reduce the temptation to flood a cyclical memory market when prices are strong. They also create execution obligations: Sandisk still has to build the right products, deliver on schedule, and manage a capital-heavy manufacturing partnership.

What’s next: The agreements are most valuable if they smooth the memory cycle instead of merely locking in volume near a peak. Watch whether customer floors protect cash flow when pricing weakens, how much capacity spending arrives before revenue, and whether concentrated AI demand changes negotiating power. The company hasn’t eliminated cyclicality, but it’s trying to make the next downturn less surprising.

Source: Sandisk

The labor market keeps sending the same mixed message: layoffs aren’t surging, yet hiring has lost momentum. That combination can support a future rate cut without signaling an immediate recession, but it also means workers who lose a job may have fewer easy landing spots.

The news: New unemployment-benefit applications rose to 209,000 last week from a revised 200,000, landing above economists’ expectations but remaining low by historical standards. The four-week average was about 199,000, while continuing claims stayed near 1.8 million. Those figures fit a low-hire, low-fire economy: employers aren’t cutting staff aggressively, but they’re also adding fewer positions. July payrolls declined by 23,000, so weekly claims now matter as an early check on whether that weakness is spreading.

Big picture: A small rise in claims isn’t a crisis, and treating it like one would miss the useful part of the data. Businesses should plan for slower customer income growth and a less mobile workforce, while households may want a larger job-search cushion than the headline unemployment rate suggests. For the Fed, gradual cooling creates room to lower rates only if inflation keeps cooperating.

Source: Associated Press

Britain’s economy expanded more than the weakest monthly readings had implied, helped by services and a healthier June. The result won’t erase household pressure or weak industrial output, but it gives policymakers a sturdier starting point than a near-stall would’ve provided.

The news: Gross domestic product grew 0.4% in the three months through June after a 0.6% increase in the previous three-month period. June alone rose 0.3%, with services up 0.4%, while production fell 0.2% and construction slipped 0.1%. Across the quarter, services increased 0.5% and carried the expansion. GDP was 1.1% higher than a year earlier, and information-and-communication activity was a notable contributor. That mix shows an economy that’s leaning on digital and professional work more than factories.

Bottom line: Britain hasn’t escaped its productivity and cost-of-living problems, but steady service growth gives companies a reason to keep investing selectively. The next test is whether wage gains and lower borrowing costs lift consumer demand without reviving inflation. If manufacturing stays weak, a services-led expansion can continue, though it’ll leave regional and sector gaps that a national GDP figure tends to hide.

Source: Office for National Statistics

Adyen isn’t trying to remain only the software that approves a payment. Its first-half update showed solid growth while acquisitions and new products pushed the Dutch company deeper into promotions, billing, treasury, and other merchant workflows.

The news: First-half net revenue grew 16.2% to nearly €1.1 billion, or 17.9% on a constant-currency basis. EBITDA increased 15.3% to €545.3 million, with a 42.5% margin excluding one-time costs. The company’s Talon.One and Orb acquisitions add loyalty, promotion, and usage-based billing tools, while new agent-focused and money-movement products extend the platform after a sale. That broader offering can deepen customer relationships, but it also adds integration work and expenses before every cross-sell opportunity becomes revenue.

What’s next: Merchants don’t want another disconnected dashboard, so Adyen’s advantage depends on making the acquired tools feel native. Watch retention, larger-customer adoption, and whether margins recover as one-time acquisition work fades. The strategic promise is attractive: a payment relationship can become a financial operating system. The risk is that a wider product map becomes harder to execute consistently.

Source: Adyen

Nebius showed how quickly AI-cloud revenue can scale—and how much cash and equipment that scale can consume. The Amsterdam-based company crossed into positive adjusted operating cash earnings, but its factory-like spending profile remains the number investors and customers shouldn’t ignore.

The news: Second-quarter revenue climbed 454% to $582.3 million, while adjusted EBITDA reached $236.2 million after a loss a year earlier. On standard accounting, Nebius still lost $190.4 million from continuing operations. It spent roughly $5.7 billion on property, equipment, and intangible assets during the quarter, far above its operating earnings, as it added data-center capacity. Cash stood at about $8.0 billion at quarter-end, and deferred revenue wasn’t far from $6.0 billion across current and long-term obligations.

Big picture: Positive adjusted EBITDA doesn’t make an infrastructure build self-funding. Nebius has customer commitments and rapid demand, but power, chips, construction, and financing must arrive before much of the revenue does. Buyers should watch delivery capacity; investors should watch cash conversion and leverage. AI-cloud growth can be real at the same time its funding needs remain enormous, and both facts belong in the model.

Source: Nebius

Q: Why’d the wholesale price bring a ladder?

A: It’d heard margins were on the way up.

a company’s ability to take on higher input expenses without raising customer prices by the same amount, usually by accepting lower margins or finding efficiencies.

In a sentence: July’s softer producer costs could improve cost absorption for businesses that’ve been shielding customers from energy and freight increases.

Tech Moves Fast. TLDR Helps You Keep Up.

From AI breakthroughs to startup trends and market-moving innovation, technology is reshaping how businesses grow and investors think. TLDR gives 1.6 million readers a quick daily breakdown of the most interesting stories in tech, startups, and programming. It’s a simple way to stay ahead of the trends driving the future economy. Sign-up here.