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Good morning and happy Friday.
Dim sum, lose some. Hui Ka Yan’s $42 billion net worth made him the richest man in Asia in 2017. On Thursday, the 67-year-old founder of property giant Evergrande learned all his assets are being confiscated and that he will spend the rest of his life in prison. The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court handed him the sentence for embezzlement of assets and corporate bribery, five years after Evergrande defaulted on most of its $300 billion in liabilities.
The court also fined companies with ties to Hui $2.3 billion for concealing debt and falsifying records. Evergrande’s failure exposed investors, stressed parts of China’s banking system, and sparked an ongoing, nationwide real estate crisis. While Hui’s punishment is harsh, Chinese homeowners being forced to sell amid collapsing home values and financial distress might be a little upset that he gets a guaranteed roof over his head.
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MARKETS
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Stock data as of market close on August 20, 2026.
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The world’s largest retailer, Walmart is widely seen as a bellwether for the US economy and consumer sentiment. On Thursday, the company reported second-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street’s expectations, raised its annual sales outlook and revealed a record-breaking tariff refund.
Naturally, shares in Walmart … fell 9.8%. That’s because comparable sales growth, a closely watched metric, came in at the lowest level in more than six years, leaving investors concerned that stressed American consumers are running out of steam. CFO John Rainey told The Wall Street Journal the comparable figure is “a legacy fixation” of investors. Analysts remained bullish, suggesting a buy-the-dip opportunity on shares that don’t always come at such low prices. Finally, there’s strong evidence the real culprit of the slowdown wasn’t reluctant consumers after all.
Not Always This Low
Walmart reported its revenue rose 5.9% year over year to $187.9 billion, and operating income rose 29% to $9.4 billion, with the top- and bottom-line figures beating forecasts. The retailer also reported a 24% increase in US e-commerce sales and 38% sales growth at its advertising business, a sign of strength at two nascent digital channels whose growth is an essential complement to its core big box store business. Normally, investors would be happy with that.
But that pesky, aforementioned US comparable sales figure tripped up Thursday’s earnings announcement. A measure of revenue growth at existing retail locations and digital channels that strips out the distortion of newly opened stores, comparable sales rose 2.6%. Not only was that well short of the 3.8% gain analysts polled by FactSet expected, it marked the slowest growth pace since 2020. This looked especially off target next to big box rival Target, which reported 3.8% comparable sales growth in the same period earlier this week. But, while investors have long used this reading as a leading performance metric, the math is more complicated this quarter:
- US comparable sales would have been a much more robust 3.4% without new pharmacy-pricing regulations, Walmart said. Medicare drug-pricing rules and other federal policies, along with cheaper retail price tags on GLP-1 drugs, have reduced pharmacy revenue, even as prescription volumes continue to rise.
- Walmart also said Thursday that it expects more overall sales growth this year than previously. Executives hiked their annual sales growth outlook to between 4% and 5% from the previous forecast of 3.5% to 4.5%.
  Washington Windfall: Walmart pulled down a $2.9 billion tariff rebate in the quarter, a result of the Supreme Court’s February ruling that struck down most of the Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs from last year. Target reported receiving a $1 billion refund and Home Depot $730 million. For its part, Walmart pledged to direct the money toward price cuts, the better to keep those consumers, tired or not, coming back for more.
Written by Sean Craig
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Photo via Scribe
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About $700 million in bitcoin short positions were liquidated this week in less time than it takes to heat up a $20 burrito (about one minute). Bitcoin climbed above $72,000 Thursday, a day after the Treasury moved to double long-duration bond buybacks and, separately, President Trump put pressure on lawmakers to pass crypto’s long-awaited Clarity Act.
Bitcoin breaking out of the $62,000-to-$66,000 cage it’s been in for the past six weeks caused bearish bets to backfire. Over the 24 hours through Thursday morning, CoinGlass found about $1.8 billion in bitcoin shorts were liquidated as bitcoin’s second-biggest short squeeze ever took hold.
At the same time, spot bitcoin ETFs on Wednesday notched their biggest daily inflow ($517 million) since early May, per SoSoValue. Now, investors will be watching to see if bitcoin’s bounceback has staying power.
‘QE Lite’ Does Not Equal QE
The US Treasury’s move to double its long-term bond buybacks from $2 billion to $4 billion has been dubbed “QE Lite” on social media, meaning “Quantitative Easing Lite.” It’s not actually quantitative easing, to be clear. But it may have a similar impact by weakening the US dollar and sending investors scurrying to assets perceived as debasement hedges, 21Shares said. Bitcoin is sometimes interpreted as a hedge against a weakening dollar because of its fixed supply that can’t be tweaked by an outside force like a central bank.
Traders were already starting to move money back into bitcoin when the second wave in the set rolled in:
- President Trump assembled the crypto Avengers — Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong, Kraken Co-CEO Arjun Sethi, and the Winklevoss twins among them — in the White House’s Roosevelt Room to talk digital shop. In the meeting, Trump put pressure on Congress to pass the Clarity Act, a wide-reaching bill for regulating crypto whose deadline has been delayed twice. It’s currently set for September 15.
- CFTC Chair Michael Selig said Thursday the agency plans to “move swiftly” to set rules around crypto if the Clarity Act fails to pass and will immediately roll out the bill’s rules if it does.
Warming Up: Bitcoin’s been looking bearish for a while, and it’ll need to sustain its upswing for a while longer to ignite hope of melting its current crypto winter. Its short-term versus long-term moving averages after this week’s rally still form a death cross, and the coin is still far off its October peak above $126,000.
Written by Jamie Wilde
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John Deere may be the world’s largest manufacturer of agricultural equipment, but another business line is the real reason it’s plowing ahead.
The company reported its fiscal third-quarter earnings Thursday, with revenue climbing 6.2% year over year to $11 billion, and income rising 7% to $1.4 billion. Both figures came in ahead of Wall Street forecasts. The results showed Deere crushing a new field, as its construction business proved a beneficiary of the AI infrastructure boom. Shares in the company rose 6.94%.
Chatbots Need Dozers, Too
Goldman Sachs expects $1 trillion in AI spending this year, $800 billion of that by US hyperscalers. To make it happen, the world is gonna need a lot of dump trucks, backhoes, bulldozers and excavators, of which Deere has plenty.
Its earnings are a testament to how the company is already cashing in. Deere’s construction and forestry sales rose 18% to $3.6 billion. Investor Relations Director Chris Seibert said on an analyst call that “customer backlogs now extend well into fiscal year 2027.” The AI boom could not have come at a more welcome time, as it offsets a cyclical downturn in Deere’s biggest and most famous business line:
- Sales at Deere’s largest unit, its agriculture division, fell 6.4% year over year in the quarter to $4 billion. Executives said the explanation is simple: Deere booked fewer shipments.
- Farm incomes have tumbled from record highs in 2022, forcing farmers to cut back on capital spending and creating a lull in demand for Deere tractors and harvesters. The war in Iran, which has sent diesel fuel and fertilizer prices soaring this year, has added even more stress to farm budgets.
Time for a Reset: Deere’s full-year industry outlook forecasts large agriculture equipment volumes will fall 15% to 20% this year in the US and Canada, while construction equipment volumes will rise 5% to 10%. Deere CEO John May said the company thinks 2026 will be the end of the current downcycle in agriculture equipment, saying the manufacturer is “well positioned for long-term value creation.”
Written by Sean Craig
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- Foreign Student Freefall: The number of overseas students seeking spots at US colleges this fall slid 10%, or about 16,000, according to Common App, a widely used college application platform.
- Return of the Bourbon: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney asked the country’s provincial leaders to end retaliatory bans on the sale of US-made alcohol as the two countries work on a trade deal.
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