Market Letter, September 2026: the price of long time
Earnings have not grown this fast since 2021. Thirty-year money has not cost this much since 2007. Both markets are telling the truth, and that is what makes this autumn interesting.
The season turns on thirty years
A summer in markets usually fits into one sentence. This one needs two, and they contradict each other.
American equities ended August within a breath of their records, carried by the strongest earnings growth since 2021. Over the same weeks, the rate at which the United States borrows for thirty years spent more than one session in three above 5%, which had not happened since 2007, and the money market began to price a rate rise rather than a cut.
One market says the future is expensive. The other says time is expensive. Both are right.
Why the long rate
We have chosen to read the period through the thirty-year rate, because it connects every subject in this letter.
The build-out of artificial intelligence is now borrowed at the expensive end of the curve, for installations that last fifteen to twenty years, on credit rather than out of profits. The US Treasury, by doubling its buybacks of long bonds, has shown that it treats this rate as a variable it manages rather than merely observes. Gold, back above 4’500 dollars an ounce in August before easing, prices exactly that doubt. And Switzerland, whose policy rate sits at zero with no rise announced, lives in a different regime of time, one in which the franc serves as the world’s funding currency.
One figure captures the ambiguity of the moment. Second-quarter earnings at S&P 500 companies grew 52% year on year. Remove Alphabet and Amazon, which carry most of those gains, and index growth returns to 34%. The number is still excellent. But part of what the market read as operating profit is the revaluation of a bet those companies placed on themselves.
What the letter contains
01 · Rates and central banks. The bond market has taken the floor again. We are not building a portfolio that needs the thirty-year rate to come down in order to do well.
02 · Equities. A rally that was earned, and an accounting line. We stay invested in a market carried by earnings, without mistaking the index for the economy.
03 · Artificial intelligence. The build-out is now financed on credit. Had it been financed out of equity, disappointment would have shown in share prices. Financed by debt, it will show first in the quality of bank credit.
04 · Energy, gold and currencies. A war without a price. We read crude as a lagging indicator, and refined products, strategic stocks and strategic metals as the real thermometers of the conflict.
05 · Switzerland. The franc, the world’s funding currency. Zero short rates with no tightening announced, a currency the world borrows, a solid real economy.
06 · Calendar. The facts that would prove us wrong, quantified and dated in advance so they can be held against us.
07 · Method. The laboratory that re-reads itself each night.
Our underlying conviction
It has not moved since the spring. When an economy’s binding constraint becomes physical again, delivered electricity, memory, cooling, grid connection times, it is the holders of those scarce things who capture the rent, not those who buy the story through equities.
Autumn 2026 adds a question: if the build-out disappoints, whose balance sheet takes the loss?
This letter does not try to predict the next quarter. It sets out what we observe, what we make of it, and what would change our minds. Each of the five analysis sections closes with our reading, marked as such.
This document is an information document. It constitutes neither investment advice, nor an offer, nor a solicitation to buy or sell any financial instrument. Past performance is not a guide to future performance.
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