Japan is the headline this morning. Kevin Warsh’s speech at Jackson Hole on Friday has rattled yen and JGB markets in a way that will matter for positioning this week. The yen broke through ¥160 to the dollar and Japanese yields hit their highest level in three decades. The market is reading Warsh’s remarks as a signal of sustained tightening pressure, and the moves are sharp enough that anyone with duration or currency exposure in Asia needs to be watching closely.

The US-Iran conflict is still generating market consequences. There were fresh US strikes on Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend — the first confirmed action since late July — and the pattern of winners and losers is now fairly well established: banks and energy firms up, airlines and automakers taking the hit. The Pakistan-Saudi-Turkey defence conversations are worth noting in the background, but nothing actionable there yet.

On the UK, the Conservatives reshuffled their shadow cabinet over the weekend, with Andrew Griffith replacing Mel Stride as shadow chancellor. Griffith is a former City minister and closer to the free-market wing of the party. It doesn’t change the parliamentary arithmetic, but it does shift the tone of the opposition’s economic critique heading into the autumn fiscal statement. Separately, the government’s early release scheme is drawing fire after Starmer indicated prisoners on indefinite sentences could be freed to ease capacity pressure. The politics are uncomfortable, but the immediate macro read is limited.

Tim Cook formally hands over the Apple chief executive role to John Ternus on Tuesday after fifteen years. The FT has the retrospective by the numbers. It’s a clean succession and markets have had time to price it, but Tuesday’s handover is still the kind of moment that can prompt fresh scrutiny of the stock.

ChatGPT has been designated a very large online platform under the EU’s Digital Services Act, alongside Reddit and Roblox. The practical consequence is a significantly heavier compliance burden for OpenAI in Europe — algorithmic audits, content moderation obligations, and regulator access to data. It’s another structural cost being layered onto the AI sector’s European operations.

The Economist’s framing of Putin’s position is worth a read if you have time — the argument is that his refusal to negotiate is structurally rooted in Russian domestic politics rather than battlefield calculation, which has implications for how long the Ukraine premium stays in European energy and defence pricing.

The ISM manufacturing print for the US drops tomorrow morning.

Sources

Al Jazeera, TechCrunch, BBC News, Guardian, FT, Ars Technica, The Economist, Politico — 2026-08-31