Warsh Ends Forward Guidance as Nepal's Toll Nears 600

Fed governor Kevin Warsh moved first overnight, signalling a possible rate hike and explicitly retiring forward guidance, the Fed's decade-old habit of pre-announcing its rate path to steer markets ahead of the move itself. This column had Warsh spending the week talking markets calm ahead of his Jackson Hole address; he did the opposite, and that call did not hold. In Nepal, the flood death toll is nearing 600 with nearly 1,400 still missing, mostly tourists, and China has pledged emergency aid while SCMP raises whether the disaster forces a redesign of the China-Nepal rail link, the flagship cross-border project both governments have staked capital on. A Hong Kong bank CISO now has to decide by Monday whether the Berlin data-extortion case and the ATF ransomware breach, both surfacing inside 48 hours, are isolated hits or a pattern worth escalating past the usual quarterly review. PaperCut shipped its second emergency patch in a month: the vendor did not close the hole, it moved. BYD's return to profit after five losing quarters says more about actual buyer demand in China than Beijing's new property package does. Watch whether Warsh's hike signal survives Tuesday's inflation print or gets walked back the way forward guidance itself just was.