China's president is visiting Washington for the first time in over a decade, meeting President Trump, with Elon Musk present. In the stock market the American chip companies behind AI (Nvidia, AMD, Micron) have soared this year, while the big Chinese tech names (Alibaba, Baidu) have fallen. Tesla is down, but SpaceX, which listed this June and absorbed Musk's AI company xAI, is back near its opening price. Jon lays it out over a chess game in Bryant Park while Dave nurses a hangover.

The companies behind boutique fitness, Peloton, Planet Fitness, the owner of CycleBar, have lost most of their stock-market value. Michelle and Jessica, side by side on their mats at a Tuesday night yoga class, joke that a yoga class is no better than a bar for meeting decent men, and just as beaten down as the fitness stocks. Only Life Time, the big-box gym, is up.

The leaders of the world met at the United Nations in New York to talk about the wars in Iran, Gaza and Ukraine. The President threatened one country and another walked out. The only number the market produced from a day of speeches about war and peace was a small drop in the price of oil, because traders decided the talking made war a little less likely. Maria, in a Brooklyn bookshop, asks what the speeches are actually for, and who they are for.

SanDisk makes the memory chips and cards that store data, and AI data centres need enormous amounts of memory, so its shares have gone up seventeen times in a year. Dave's hot tip is the stock everyone can see; his warning is the part people skip: the company's own boss sold shares last night, and the price is still a fifth below its peak. Not advice. A tip with a footnote, from a man on a skateboard.

The biggest technology companies are spending sums on AI this year that look like national infrastructure budgets: three quarters of a trillion dollars on buildings, power and chips, most of it not visible to anyone using a chatbot. Jon, at a friend's loft painting a mural of the skyline, argues that is the point: AI is turning into infrastructure, like electricity or the internet, and calling it a gadget misses what the money is doing.

The most popular podcasts in America are, to a striking degree, about murder. Tonight's Apple chart has three true-crime shows in the top ten and five in the top twenty-five, with Crime Junkie at number two behind only the New York Times' news show. Jessica notices this at her Monday salsa class and offers a theory: the news is frightening enough, and a murder story at least ends. She'd rather dance.

The President banned three news organisations from the White House last week. Today they sued him, saying the Constitution's protection of a free press does not let a president pick which reporters may cover him. He says it is his house and his rules. The stock market did not react to any of that. It reacted to something else: CNN's owner is being bought, in a $110 billion deal that cleared its last legal hurdle today, so its shares jumped 11%. Maria, who reports on what the numbers leave out, asks the question underneath: who is the news for, when the news itself is for sale.

Dating apps are public companies, so the record keeps score on them the way it does on everything else. Bumble, the app where women make the first move, has lost almost all of its stock-market value since it listed and is shrinking. Match, which owns Tinder and Hinge, is doing fine. Michelle calls Jessica from a bar to complain about the men in New York, and Jessica tells her what the market thinks. They find this funny. So did we.

The British government is telling people to keep a few days of emergency supplies at home: water, tinned food, a torch, a radio, batteries, medicine. It has said this quietly for years, but ministers are saying it loudly now, because of Russia and because of the weather. Michelle, our commodities presenter, who lives on the Upper East Side and eats very well, reads the nine-item list and notices there is no caviar on it. She is joking. Mostly.

Over the weekend Ukraine launched its biggest drone attack of the year and hit an oil refinery in Moscow. Russia said it would hit Kyiv back. You might expect oil prices to jump on news like that. They fell. Traders are watching how much oil is actually moving through the world's shipping lanes, and that number has been strong, so the price went down while the news got worse. Jon, who takes long walks through the city before dawn to think, and who never says what he does for a living, points out the gap between the headlines and the price.

Every month the US government counts how much was spent building things. One line in that count is data centres, the buildings full of computers that run AI. That line has doubled in two years and now runs at six and a half billion dollars a month. Maria, who reports on what the markets leave out, asks the question the number does not answer: who is this for, and what would it cost us to slow down a little.

Commodities are the raw stuff: the beans, the grain, the sugar that ends up in your breakfast. This year they have got dearer. Soybeans are up a quarter, helped by China buying a million tons from American farmers this month; wheat, which becomes your bagel, is up 41%; sugar is up 16%. Coffee's price is not on the tape, but the tape watches the weather over the farms that grow it: Brazil's main coffee region is flowering right now with plenty of rain and no heat, which is good news for next year's beans. Matcha, the green tea powder the shop sells, is not on the tape at all yet. Michelle, new to the channel, is not impressed by the hour.

Weather moves markets more than people think. When a hurricane or a heatwave hits, insurers pay out, generator makers sell more, and factories slow down. Chip fabs are the most sensitive of all: they need steady power and water and no floods, so the tape watches the weather alerts over every big fab and refinery. This month TSMC's sites in Taiwan sat under extreme heat warnings and then flood warnings within a week. Dave tells it from a sushi bar on the Lower East Side, because the city is back from summer and so is he.

Apple showed its new phones this month. The headline product is its first folding iPhone, the Duo, which costs more than $2,000, the most Apple has ever asked for a phone, and the rest of the range got pricier too. Investors liked it: Apple's shares rose about 5% over the two days after the event and are now close to their all-time high, up about a quarter this year. The part to watch is not the phone but the chip inside it, made by TSMC in Taiwan on the most advanced process in the world. TSMC's shares are up 36% this year, and the memory-chip makers that supply every phone have done even better.

The Grain of Salt is a free weekly email. Each Saturday it puts together a version of the market that never makes the news, built from the same record these videos come from: prices, company filings, what insiders bought, what betting markets believe, satellite passes over factories and fires, ships through the world's chokepoints, the Fed, the FDA, the box office. Nothing arrives unmarked: every section carries a score from 0 to 100 for how much to believe it, so a price and a rumour never look the same. Subscribe at thegrainofsalt.online. Leave whenever you like.

WallStreetBets is a huge online forum where people post about the stocks they are betting on, loudly and often as a joke. AirPort reads it, but files every post as an opinion with a trust score of 50 out of 100, half-trusted at best, while a company's audited filing scores 92. That score travels with the fact, so a model or a reader always knows which is which. This week the forum's favourite is Micron, the memory-chip maker, with posts calling for $1,500. What is actually on the record is that Micron has more than tripled this year and closed at about $1,015. Dave's point: enjoy the rumour, trade the record.

The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow exit from the Persian Gulf that about a fifth of the world's oil passes through. Since the fighting began, ships going through it have been attacked by both sides, and far fewer are trying: the tape's count of ships calling through the strait is down to about four a day from nearly eleven in June, and tankers to about one a day from nearly five. Fewer tankers willing to sail means the ones that do can charge much more, which is why the shipping companies that own tankers have more than doubled in value this year. Jessica explains it from a yoga mat, in tree pose, because balance is the whole game.

The United States and Iran have been fighting since the start of September, mostly around the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow sea lane that carries a fifth of the world's oil. This week the Pentagon put a price on it: $33.4 billion spent so far, with some weapons stocks running low. Oil has been above $100 a barrel since Iran attacked ten ships on 10 September, which is why petrol and heating cost more. Jessica tells it from behind a bar while making a whisky on the rocks the proper way: one large clear cube, a two-ounce pour, thirty seconds, no stirring. The whisky is hers; the numbers are the tape's.

The White House decides which journalists are allowed into its briefings and grounds. On Thursday the President said three news organisations, CNN, MS NOW (the network formerly called MSNBC) and Politico, would no longer be allowed in, and on Friday their reporters were turned away. The three outlets objected publicly. The criticism was not limited to those three: The Hill reported that contributors on Fox News also spoke against the ban. This page records what happened and how it was received, and takes no side.

Natural gas heats homes, runs factories and makes electricity. America produces its own, so a unit of gas costs about three dollars here. Europe has to import most of its gas by pipeline or by ship, and this year the price there has nearly tripled to about nine times the American price. Oil is expensive everywhere because of the fighting around the Strait of Hormuz, but oil is the same price for everyone; gas is where Europe pays more. The gas Europe is buying increasingly comes from American export terminals, which is why the American exporters are among the year's best-performing shares while Germany's market is flat.

The Federal Reserve sets the interest rate that every other rate in America follows. Yesterday it raised that rate for the first time in three years, by a quarter of a percentage point, because prices are still rising at 3.4% a year and oil costs more than $100 a barrel. Higher rates make borrowing dearer: the 10-year government bond now pays 5%, and a 30-year mortgage costs about 6.8%. That is why a rate rise matters to you even if you never buy a share.

Nike, the biggest sportswear brand in the world, is worth a fifth of what it was at its 2021 peak, and this week it lost its place in the S&P 100, the index of America's hundred biggest companies. Lululemon, the yoga-wear brand, has halved this year. The fashion name that is going up is e.l.f. Beauty, which sells make-up at drugstore prices: up 23% this year. Shoppers are trading down.

On Monday three of the best-known people in AI, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk, said the industry should slow down building its most powerful models. The companies that make the chips and hardware for AI fell hardest, because slower AI means fewer chips sold. Netflix rose, because it spends its money on shows, not on AI hardware.

Even as the models were told to slow down, investors kept pouring money in. Anthropic is reported to be preparing a stock-market listing valuing it at $2 trillion. OpenAI's boss says his company will not list this year. Nvidia gave a record $26 billion back to its shareholders, and CoreWeave, which rents out AI computers, says it cannot keep up with demand.

Target, the retailer, has been a better stock than Nvidia this year, up nearly 60% against Nvidia's 17%. A new chief executive is retraining staff, redesigning stores and using AI behind the scenes. The lesson people are drawing: the winners of the AI year are not only the companies that make AI.

SpaceX floated on the stock market in June. After a volatile summer the shares are back at about $150, the price they opened at on the first day. Analysts' guesses for where it goes next range from $75 to $800, which is a polite way of saying nobody knows.

Micron makes memory chips, the part of a computer that holds what the processor is working on. AI systems need enormous amounts of it, so Micron's shares have almost tripled this year, from about $315 to about $924. They were higher still in June. Everyone watches Nvidia; the memory makers have quietly done as well or better.