The Open Bell — Ep. 044 — 21 Aug 2026

Today on The Open Bell: Walmart just posted its weakest US sales growth in six years, low-income shoppers are pulling back hard under the weight of fuel costs, and the company's own leadership won't promise the next quarter looks any better. The UAE has cut all financial ties with Iran following ballistic missile strikes on its territory, and Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, is now sitting at $93 a barrel, which is 37% higher than it was this time last year and heading in the wrong direction for anyone who drives, flies, or heats their home. The US Treasury tried to calm its own bond market by announcing bigger buybacks of long-dated government debt, the bond market thought about it for a few hours, and then pushed the 30-year yield straight back up to 5.25%, which tells you something about how much confidence investors actually have in Washington's ability to manage its borrowing costs right now. If today's episode helped you make sense of a genuinely ugly week, a five-star rating takes about ten seconds and it helps more people find the show. Hosted by Alex Monroe. New episodes every weekday morning at theopenbell.co Not investment advice. For informational purposes only. --- Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:15 Walmart shares tumble 9% on slowest US sales growth in six y 03:04 Brent crude climbs to $93 as UAE sanctions Iran after missil 05:04 30-yr US Treasury yield surges to 5.25% as buyback relief fa 06:58 Closing thoughts

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Good morning. It's Friday, 24 August, 206, and this is the Open Bell. I'm Alex Monroe. The American consumer is under pressure. Oil is getting more expensive by the week, and the bond market just told Washington it doesn't believe the plan. Let's get into it. Start with where you spend money. The grocery store, the petrol station, the big box retailer where you pick up everything from cereal to socks. Walmart is all three of those things for tens of millions of American households. And yesterday, it told the market something that should make everyone pay attention. U.S. comparable store sales, the measure of how much existing Walmart locations are actually selling, stripped of new store openings, rose just 2.6% in the most recent quarter. That's the weakest growth rate in six years. The last time Walmart put up a number that soft was the early months of the pandemic in 2020, when the world had genuinely stopped functioning. There's no lockdown excuse this time. What there is is an oil price that's up 37% from a year ago and a low income shopper who is making hard choices at the checkout. Walmart is not a luxury brand. It is where people go when they are already being careful with money. When the customers who shop at Walmart start pulling back, you're not looking at a shift in taste or preference. You're looking at pressure that has moved all the way down the income ladder until it has nowhere left to go. The stock fell more than 8% on the day. That dragged the Dow Jones industrial average, the index tracking 30 of America's largest companies, down 554 points or just over 1%, closing around 53,000. The broader SP 500, which covers 500 large US companies, fell about half a percent. Now, the counterargument deserves a fair hearing. Walmart's online sales grew 23% globally. Operating income was up roughly 21% year over year. There are analysts who will tell you that the sell-off was overdone, that the structural business is healthy, that the headline comp sales number is misleading. But here's the problem with that argument. Walmart's own management didn't make it convincingly. Their guidance for the next quarter, net sales growth of 3 to 3 and 3 quarter percent, operating income growth of 2 to 4% came in below what analysts had expected. And the full year earnings forecast of $2.80 to $2.87 per share was a clear miss against the roughly $3 analysts had penciled in. When the company running the largest retail operation in the world won't promise things improve from here, that's not an earnings miss. That's a warning. The downstream consequence matters too. If Walmart is cutting its own expectations because shoppers are stretched, other retailers follow. Orders to suppliers get trimmed, logistics networks slow down, hourly workers in warehouses, distribution centers, and stores, the people for whom Walmart's customer base is also their employer base, are the ones who absorb the next round of adjustments. Walmart has been called a proxy for the American consumer for decades, and on that reading, the American consumer is quietly running out of road. The fuel costs squeezing those Walmart shoppers aren't easing. And yesterday, they got a fresh reason to get worse. Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil prices, the number that sets what countries pay for most of the world's seaborne supply, closed at $93 a barrel on Thursday. That's up 1.5% on the day, and it's now 37% higher than it was a year ago. Per Reuters and energy market data, the move was driven by the UAE announcing a full suspension of financial and economic ties with Iran, following reports of Iranian ballistic missile strikes on UAE territory. This is a significant escalation in the Gulf standoff. Up until now, the primary mechanism disrupting supply has been the physical choke point, the Strait of Hormuz, and the slowdown in vessel traffic we've been tracking for months. What the UAE just added is economic warfare, cutting off the financial channels Iran uses to trade its crude. That means Iranian oil has fewer routes to market, fewer ways to be financed, fewer buyers willing to clear the transaction. WTI, the American crude benchmark, which sets what US petrol stations ultimately pay, was trading near $86.5 during Thursday's session, up about 2.3 quarter percent. The 2019 attack on Saudi Aramco's Abqaik processing facility is the historical comparison that's most commonly reached for here. That strike sent Brent up more than 14% in a single session before prices normalize within weeks once Saudi output was restored. The difference this time is duration. That was a discrete event with a recoverable infrastructure impact. This is a sustained standoff with compounding layers of escalation. Trump acknowledged crude is still flowing through the strait while leaving the door open to future talks with Tehran. Markets took that for what it was. Not a signal, not a de-escalation, not a plan. At $93 a barrel, the cost lands on your petrol bill, your grocery delivery, every flight you book. Energy is an input cost for almost everything that moves, and right now it's rising. And the cost of all of it is made worse when borrowing is expensive. The US 30-year treasury yield. The interest rate Washington pays when it borrows money for three decades, and the benchmark that 30-year fixed mortgage rates are price against, closed Thursday at 5.25%, up six basis points on the day. A basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point, so six of them is a modest but pointed move. What makes this notable is the context. Yesterday morning, as we covered, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a doubling of the government's long bond buyback program, a scheme that repurchases older Treasury debt to support prices and push yields down. The announcement worked. Briefly, yields dipped. And then, within the same session, they came almost entirely back up. The bond market, in other words, looked at the buyback plan and concluded it wasn't sufficient. The logic is fairly simple. Buying back old bonds helps manage liquidity in the market, but it doesn't change the underlying problem, which is that the US government is running a deficit large enough that it needs to keep issuing vast quantities of new debt. A buyback program that tidies one end of the market while the other end keeps flooding with supply isn't a solution. It's a pressure valve. Australian and New Zealand government bonds opened lower in Asian hours this morning as that US yield move rippled outward. When American borrowing costs rise, the pressure tends to spread through global debt markets, raising costs for households and governments well beyond U.S. borders. 5.25% on the 30-year treasury means that the mortgage rates priced off it stay elevated. That translates directly into hundreds of dollars more per month on a typical home purchase. And it keeps locking first-time buyers out of a market they've already been priced out of for years. The White House tried to calm its own bond market this week. The bond market politely but firmly declined to stay calm. So step back for a moment and look at what this week has actually told us. The American consumer is pulling back. Oil is climbing on fresh geopolitical escalation. And the bond market has made clear it doesn't trust fiscal management tools as a substitute for an actual fiscal plan. These aren't three separate problems. They are three symptoms of the same structural bind. Energy costs are elevated, borrowing costs are elevated, and the people carrying both of those burdens are starting to show it in the data. Next week, watch for any signal from Fed Chair Kevin Warsh following Jackson Hole. His remarks will be the most direct indication of whether the Fed intends to hold, hike, or signal something new on the path of rates. That's the event that could move everything else. If you want today's numbers in writing, all three stories, all the figures, the newsletters free and linked in the show notes. That's the open bell. I'm Alex Monroe. Have a sharp morning.