MPC Markets Morning Call — 22nd September 2026: Nasdaq Notches Fresh Record as AI Rally Roars Back, Oil Slides to Four-Day Low Ahead of Trump–Xi Summit
Wall Street roared back on Monday as the AI trade reignited, with the Nasdaq Composite jumping 2.3% to a record 27,122.09 points — its first record close since June — led by an 11.4% surge in Meta and AMD’s ascent past a $1 trillion market cap. A fourth straight day of falling oil prices, on hopes of Middle East diplomacy and recovering Hormuz flows, added fuel to the rally and pulled the US 10-year yield back under 5%. The ASX is set for a firmer open, with SPI futures up 0.3% to 8,808 ahead of a busy week of central bank speakers and Thursday’s Trump–Xi summit in Washington.
Global equities staged a broad, AI-led rebound on Monday as the Nasdaq Composite closed at a record 27,122.09 points, up 2.3%, while the S&P 500 added 1.5% to 7,764.70 and the Dow gained 0.7% to 52,048.83. Chipmakers led the charge — Arm jumped 17%, Intel 12% and AMD 10% to cross a $1 trillion market capitalisation for the first time — as Meta surged 11.4% on rising traction for its new Muse AI assistant. Oil extended its slide for a fourth straight session, with Brent crude falling 3.5% to $100.24 a barrel and briefly dipping below $100, as easing Strait of Hormuz supply fears and hopes for Trump–Iran diplomacy at this week’s UN General Assembly outweighed an intensifying Saudi–Houthi conflict in Yemen. The oil retreat pulled the US 10-year Treasury yield back under 5% to around 4.95%, even as Fed officials Austan Goolsbee and Alberto Musalem kept the case for further tightening alive. SoftBank’s move to raise more than $11 billion in junk bonds to fund a fresh OpenAI investment underscored how stretched AI-financing conditions have become. For the ASX, SPI futures point to a firmer open, up 0.3% to 8,808, with Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock due to speak today and all four major banks now forecasting a 25 basis point RBA hike to 4.60% on 29 September.
Nasdaq closed at a record 27,122.09, up 2.3%, its first record close since June 2; the S&P 500 added 1.5% to 7,764.70 and the Dow rose 0.7% to 52,048.83, led by an 11.4% jump in Meta and AMD topping a $1 trillion market cap.
Diplomacy dominated the geopolitical backdrop, with Trump “open” to meeting Iran’s president at the UN this week and Thursday’s Trump–Xi summit in Washington, even as the Saudi–Houthi conflict in Yemen intensified over the weekend.
Brent crude fell 3.5% to $100.24 a barrel and WTI dropped 4.9% to $95.43, a fourth consecutive daily decline, as Saudi Gulf loadings and Hormuz shipping data eased supply-disruption fears.
The US 10-year Treasury yield eased about five basis points to roughly 4.95% as the oil retreat offset hawkish commentary from Fed’s Goolsbee and Musalem, who both kept the door open to another October rate rise.
SoftBank is seeking more than $11 billion in junk bonds — potentially one of the largest such deals ever — to help fund a fresh follow-on investment in OpenAI expected to close next month.
SPI futures point to a firmer ASX open, up 0.3% to 8,808, with AUD around 0.7121 and RBA Governor Michele Bullock speaking today as all four major banks now forecast a 25bp hike to 4.60% on 29 September.
Equities: AI Trade Roars Back
Wall Street posted its best session since early August on Monday as the artificial intelligence trade burst back to life. The Nasdaq Composite jumped 2.3% to close at a record 27,122.09 points — its first record close since 2 June and within a whisker of the 27,190 intraday high struck that day. The S&P 500 rose 1.5% to 7,764.70, about 0.4% below its 13 August record, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.7% to 52,048.83. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) surged 4.3%, and eight of eleven S&P sectors finished higher, with communication services up 3.9–4.2% and information technology gaining roughly 2.5%; energy was the standout laggard, down 2.6% as crude tumbled.
Meta Platforms led the mega-cap advance, rallying 11.4% after Wells Fargo lifted its price target to $796 — a 19.6% upside from Monday’s close — citing progress on the company’s AI initiatives ahead of Wednesday’s Meta Connect keynote. Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski pointed to SensorTower data showing Meta’s new Muse AI assistant hit a record 264,000 US downloads in a single day on 19 September and 448,000 daily active users just ten days after launch — a faster trajectory than ChatGPT managed in its first year. Chipmakers rode the same wave: Arm surged 17.2%, Intel jumped 12.2%, and AMD climbed 10.0% to top a $1 trillion market capitalisation for the first time, with Vital Knowledge noting that “agentic” AI workloads — unlike earlier GPU-heavy generative AI — lean far more heavily on CPU-driven background processing, a structurally bullish setup for AMD, Arm and Intel.
Elsewhere, Warner Bros. Discovery shares jumped 10.8% after Paramount Skydance settled a multi-state antitrust lawsuit over its $110 billion acquisition of the media group, clearing a path for one of the largest media mergers in history; Paramount itself slipped almost 3% despite the resolution. AutoZone, Thor Industries, MillerKnoll and Endava headline a light overnight earnings slate, while GRAIL surged more than 33% after-hours on reports the FDA is weighing its cancer-detecting blood test. Not everyone is convinced the rally has legs: Morgan Stanley’s Michael Wilson cautioned that a further tightening of financial conditions or materially higher energy prices could still send the S&P 500 as low as 7,100 before the bull market resumes into year end.
Geopolitics: Diplomacy Overlay Ahead of Trump–Xi
Markets leaned into a diplomacy-first week. President Trump told Fox News he would “probably” be open to meeting Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of this week’s UN General Assembly in New York, even as the US and Iran continued to trade threats — Trump warning he would “wipe out” Iran’s leadership if Tehran does not pursue a deal, and Iran’s military vowing to retaliate against any renewed attacks. China’s Foreign Ministry formally confirmed President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington from 23–25 September, his first since 2015, with the leaders due to meet Thursday. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described preliminary weekend talks with China’s Vice Premier He Lifeng as “very successful,” and the two sides agreed to establish a “US-China AI dialogue” covering AI safety and a notification mechanism for AI-related security incidents.
The optimism sits alongside an unresolved and, in places, escalating conflict. Fighting between Saudi Arabia and Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen reportedly intensified over the weekend as the Houthis pushed to seize ground near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a critical alternative shipping route for Saudi oil exports, while also claiming missile and drone strikes on Riyadh. Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline remains shut, though the kingdom has offset the loss by ramping up east-coast exports and ship-to-ship transfers off Oman — Kpler data show Saudi exports back above 4 million barrels per day in September, up from a 2.4 million bpd trough in August. Former Kazakhstan World Bank governor Yerbol Orynbayev cautioned that the Bab el-Mandeb corridor is “another frontier for oil supply disruption” even as headline prices ease.
“Despite oil prices beginning to trend downward, control of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait is now another frontier for oil supply disruption, and the East-West pipeline… still appears to be out of action. These developments will only extend the conflict in the Middle East, and worsen the global economic picture,” Yerbol Orynbayev, former World Bank governor of Kazakhstan, told Investing.com. He added that with US energy costs up 13% since January 2025, “a meaningful drop in inflation may be out of reach” — a domestically sticky, potentially stagflationary, problem.
US politics is amplifying the stakes: a new Reuters/Ipsos poll put President Trump’s approval rating at a career-low 32%, with high living costs, record diesel prices and the unpopularity of the seven-month-old Iran war all weighing ahead of 3 November midterm elections. Kurt Campbell, a former US deputy secretary of state, told Bloomberg TV that Beijing remains deeply wary of US intentions on AI: “They are going to be reluctant to enter into anything that would constrain Chinese actions… they fundamentally distrust the United States here.” Further progress is more likely to come at subsequent leader-level meetings — November’s APEC summit in Shenzhen and December’s G20 in Florida — than at Thursday’s Washington meeting itself.
Energy, Commodities & FX
Oil fell for a fourth consecutive session. Brent crude settled 3.5% lower at $100.24 a barrel, briefly dipping below the psychologically important $100 mark for the first time in around a fortnight, while WTI crude dropped 4.9% to $95.43. The decline followed an upbeat update from US Central Command’s Admiral Brad Cooper, who said more than 1 billion barrels of crude had moved through the Strait of Hormuz over the past two months, with volumes “higher than at any point in the past six months.” Even so, the picture is not uniformly reassuring: reporting on actual Hormuz vessel traffic and satellite tracking remains more cautious than the headline figures suggest, and the Saudi East-West Pipeline shutdown continues to erode the kingdom’s inventory buffer.
US pump prices tell a different story to the futures market. GasBuddy data showed the US average gasoline price rising 18.5 cents over the past week to $4.44 a gallon, while diesel jumped 30.7 cents to $6.49 a gallon — still near the record levels that pushed Iowa Republicans, including Senator Chuck Grassley, to call for a ban on diesel exports to relieve pressure on farmers and truckers. Copper continued to grind toward its own record, with LME three-month futures up 1% to $14,661 a tonne, supported by tightening Chinese supply and planned refinery maintenance between October and November.
Spot gold slipped 0.8% to $4,343.73 an ounce as the broader risk-on tone and firmer dollar offset safe-haven demand, while the US 10-year Treasury yield eased roughly five basis points to about 4.95%, pulling back under 5% for the first time since before last week’s Fed hike. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index rose 0.1%, with the euro slipping 0.2% to $1.1464, the pound down 0.2% to $1.3367 and the yen 0.4% weaker at 157.43 per dollar. Bitcoin was the standout risk asset, surging 7% to $86,721.85 on a mix of falling oil prices, easing rate anxiety and a boost to crypto sentiment from a new SEC exemption permitting tokenised US stock trading on blockchain venues.
Private Credit: SoftBank’s AI Funding Cascade
SoftBank Group is seeking the equivalent of more than $11 billion in what would be one of the largest junk bond deals ever, split between $10 billion of dollar securities across three tenors and €1 billion of euro debt across two maturities. Proceeds will help fund a follow-on investment in OpenAI expected to close next month. Early sounding levels range from the low-to-high 9% area on dollar tranches out to seven-and-a-half years, to mid-7% to mid-8% on euro paper — levels that would be records for SoftBank in those currencies and tenors if they hold into pricing, expected as soon as Thursday.
The deal adds to a fast-growing stack of AI-linked leverage at SoftBank, which has committed close to $65 billion to OpenAI. The group recently repaid a $25.9 billion bridge facility, increased an Arm-backed margin loan to $25 billion, and is in discussions with Apollo Global Management to lift a separate loan to $9 billion, on top of an already-secured $11.87 billion facility. SoftBank has sold almost $15 billion of notes across currencies so far in 2026, making it the biggest junk-rated borrower in bond markets this year, according to Bloomberg-compiled data; the yield on its dollar bond maturing in 2031 has climbed to 8.2%, from as low as 6.7% in January.
SoftBank is rated BB+ by S&P Global Ratings and Fitch — its highest speculative-grade rating — a stark contrast with Alphabet (AA+) and Amazon (AA), the two largest corporate bond issuers of 2026. Citigroup is lead bookrunner and joint global coordinator on the dollar tranches alongside Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley; JPMorgan leads the euro tranche. Recent public calls from AI leaders, including Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, to slow the pace of frontier model development have added a further layer of uncertainty, contributing to a rise in the cost of insuring SoftBank’s debt against default to a three-year high.
ASX Outlook & Day Ahead
The ASX 200 closed effectively flat on Monday, up just 0.01% at 8,731.90, a solid recovery from an early session low near the 8,674 three-month mark as banks and healthcare offset weakness in materials and tech. Perpetual (ASX:PPT) was the session’s biggest large-cap faller, down as much as 15.1% after its board rejected EQT’s sweetened $22.50-a-share takeover proposal as undervaluing the company; Telix Pharmaceuticals (ASX:TLX) fell around 11–12% on a lukewarm reception to its roughly $3.3 billion merger with Germany’s ITM. IDP Education (ASX:IEL) was the standout gainer, up 18.2% in an apparent short-squeeze rebound after shedding around 40% over the prior three months. All four major banks now forecast a 25 basis point RBA hike to 4.60% at the 29 September meeting, with Thursday’s labour force data the last major release before that decision.
SPI 200 futures point to a firmer open, up 28 points or 0.3% to 8,808, tracking the overnight AI-led rally on Wall Street, a fourth straight day of falling oil prices and Treasury yields back under 5%. The Australian dollar was little changed at around 0.7121 against the US dollar. Monday’s Asian session was already firm into the US close, with the Kospi up 1.65% on Samsung and chip names and Hong Kong and China markets higher on tech, while Japan remains closed for the Silver Week holiday through Wednesday.
Day Ahead: Key Events — Tuesday 22 September 2026
- RBA Governor Michele Bullock speaks (1:10pm AEST) — Follows Assistant Governor Sarah Hunter’s earlier remarks; markets will parse both for confirmation of the near-unanimous 29 September hike call now priced by all four majors.
- Global flash PMIs (September) — The first broad read on how firms across major economies are navigating higher energy costs and central bank tightening into month-end.
- UK public sector borrowing (August) — Comes alongside continued scrutiny of European fiscal positions after France’s 10-year bond spread over Germany widened to its highest since 2012.
- US Richmond Fed manufacturing index & $69bn two-year Treasury auction — A read on regional US factory activity and fresh demand evidence for front-end government debt as the market digests last week’s Fed hike.
- US earnings: AutoZone, Thor Industries, MillerKnoll, Endava — A light but watchable overnight slate, led by AutoZone’s read on US consumer resilience.
- FOMC’s John Williams speaks (Wed 12:05am AEST) — One of several Fed speakers this week, alongside Richmond Fed’s Thomas Barkin and Vice Chair Philip Jefferson, as markets weigh roughly even odds of another October hike.