Stephen Balzac won last week’s world-famous news haiku about how gold and bitcoin are rising now, since the Treasury's intervention in the bond market, and U.S. national debt surpassing $40 trillion, with this beauty:

“Wow! Thanks M.,” writes Stephen, in an email. “Although I guess my incentive was that this whole economic craziness scares the Living Daylights out of me. It's like watching a slow motion View to a Kill. It's hard to be optimistic and remember that Tomorrow Never Dies when so many billionaires believe The World is Not Enough. Sometimes I think the best thing is to buy gems because Diamonds Are Forever. Okay, that's enough. No Moore Bond jokes tonight.”

And here’s your celebratory gif, Stephen!

Here’s how Stephen fared against the stiff competition:

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Once the world standard, The dollar loses value. Gold and crypto rule. ~Bob Andersen (25)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Bitcoin and gold rise, Treasury props up the bonds. Forty trillion sighs. ~Amy Long (44)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Good news, employees! Your wedding ring is worth more! Just not your paycheck. ~Tim Olsen (59)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ E-money and gold, Outpace the promissory, Rise of faith alone. ~Lorene (6)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Bitcoin and gold surge. I don’t know what bitcoin is. I guess someone knows. ~Margaret Lea (30)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Debt Soars, Dollar Dives, Stopgap Measures Fail to Mend. Bit-Gold Rules the Day! ~Dick Peterson (18)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ The Bitcoin miners, Who turned AI providers, Should now mine real gold? ~Causal Hoagie (6)
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ As dollars wobble, Bitcoin, gold surge. Our accounts shrink; The one percent's grows. ~Scott Bauer (75)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Gold, bitcoin surging, Debt climbs, who will save us now? Bond. Treasury Bond. ~Stephen Balzac (80)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Bitcoin screams by Gold, Gold zips by the bond market, Investors flounder. ~Rick Wetherill (11)
354 Votes via @beehiiv polls

Congrats to all who participated.

Now. This week’s world-famous-news-haiku-competition™ is about how solar-powered robots can now cut your lawn. Send me your entry — to haiku at cheddar dot com — by noon ET Thursday, for consideration by your Cheddar peers. (Don’t worry if you get a bounceback email. The mailbox is working, it’s just been inundated with haikus lately, thank goodness!)

And can somebody tell me about the news? Oh, that’s right. I can. Here…

Matt Davis — Need2Know Chedditor

Table of Contents

• Warsh Hints at Rate Hikes To Fight Inflation

• Spies in the Sky Fuel Hawkeye 360's Growth

• Solar-Powered Robots Can Now Cut Your Lawn

• Song of the Day: Haute & Freddy, ‘Touch Touch’

• Rich Folks Are Flocking to Dollar Stores

• People Are Planning To Skip Work To Play GTA6

• Poll of the Day: Cuttin’ Up

What’s the Stock Market Up To, Eh?

$SPX ( ▼ 0.25% )  $DJI ( ▼ 0.02% )  $NDX ( ▲ 1.59% )  

Companies Mentioned in Today’s Newsletter

 $DG ( ▼ 2.38% )  $DLTR ( ▲ 0.99% )  $SNSC ( ▼ 10.0% )  $WMT ( ▲ 0.45% )  $TGT ( ▼ 1.66% )  $DB ( ▲ 0.72% )  

Warsh Hints at Rate Hikes To Fight Inflation

Freshly minted Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh dropped his highly anticipated debut speech on Friday, and if you were hoping for an interest rate cut, I’m sorry to tell you he hinted at the opposite.

Warsh, appointed by Donald Trump in May, decided it was time to play the adult in the room. He admitted that “the responsibility for 65 months of sustained, elevated inflation sits squarely with the central bank.” Since “price stability is not self-executing,” his proposed remedy is far less comforting: Interest rates — currently at 3.5% to 3.75% — might need to go up. While inflation numbers have recently improved, he warned “they do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully improved.” “We must be confident that underlying inflation is moving to our objective…. Otherwise, we have work to do,” he declared.

This tough talk is highly unlikely to please his inflation/interest rate daddy, Donald Trump, who wants borrowing costs slashed yesterday to spur growth. As Politico pointed out after the speech, any rate hike in September “will likely invoke the frustration of President Donald Trump,” even if he has spoken “warmly” of Warsh in the past compared to Jerome Powell.

How did the markets react to this threat of tighter money? Short-term Treasury yields jumped, with the two-year yield climbing to 4.30%. And ING’s Francesco Pesole labeled the speech “hawkish-leaning.” Yet, stock indexes yawned and traded around 0.25% higher.

In the end, Warsh thinks he can keep us in the dark. “You can call it an outline, you can call it a trail map — just don’t call it forward guidance,” he quipped. Sorry, Kevin. The market has already drawn its own map, and it seems to be pointing straight toward a more expensive autumn.

Quote of the Day

Spies in the Sky Fuel Hawkeye 360's Growth

If you're an investor looking for a truly recession-proof business, forget consumer staples or AI chat widgets. The real money is in tracking radio frequencies from orbit to feed the global defense industry. Just ask John Serafini, CEO of Hawkeye 360, who is currently riding a wave of geopolitical tensions straight to the bank.

Hawkeye recently reported $49.8 million in second-quarter revenue — an 87% surge year-over-year. How does one achieve such stellar growth while taking a company public? Simple. As Serafini cheerily explained, Hawkeye was busy “supporting our customers in conflicts around the world to include places like Ukraine and the Middle East and other geopolitical hotspots and areas of turmoil.” In 2026, global instability is an excellent top-line driver.

Serafini’s target demographic is, you know…lethal. “Our focus is 100% on our customer, the warfighter,” he said. Our interviewer, Justine, naturally found it “so exciting to think about all of those opportunities.” And why wouldn't she? Business is booming. Hawkeye has graduated from "experimental testing" to a lucrative five-year production contract with the National Reconnaissance Office.

With $500 million of cash sitting on the balance sheet, because “it does no one much good to have that sitting there earning T-bills,” Hawkeye is planning a massive M&A spending spree. They aim to sniff out “any signal above a watt in power” and have already proven their value in military exercises by locating adversary vessels in under 15 minutes. This, Serafini notes, provides “relevance for long range fires for the kill chain.”

Who knew a 14% EBITDA margin could sound so patriotic?

Solar-Powered Robots Can Now Cut Your Lawn

Move over, self-driving cars that can't handle a light drizzle. The real frontier of autonomous technology is quietly happening on your front lawn, where solar-powered robot mowers are preparing to relieve you of the heavy burden of pushing a noisy machine over some blades of grass.

I cut the damned grass yesterday and my fitness watch tracked it as a hard mountain-biking workout. So, color me intrigued.

Enter SunScout Holding Limited $SNSC ( ▼ 10.0% ) , a New Zealand transplant that recently went public on the NYSE to take over the American backyard. CEO Edwin Cywinski is bringing these independent beasts to a new manufacturing and distribution hub in Texas. Why Texas? Because “this is the market, and we come from New Zealand, it's impossible to serve a market out of so far away.”

Unlike primitive, "grid-connected" robotic mowers that can only manage a measly 45 minutes before crawling back to a docking station, SunScout’s units have integrated solar panels, making them “completely independent.” If the battery gets low, Cywinski notes, “the thing just parks where it is and recharges.” No more dragging yourself out of bed to find your dead robot hiding under a hydrangea.

The scale of America's lawn obsession is truly staggering. Cywinski points out that “the U.S. alone represents 63% of the world's lawn mowing industry,” with “12 million lawnmowers sold in the U.S. per year.” Naturally, SunScout is targeting the crown jewel of American leisure: Golf courses. On a golf course, a docking station might be miles away, meaning traditional robots “almost run on empty when they arrive where they should mow.” But SunScout’s robot “can remain there and it can recharge right there and keep on going.”

Best of all, Cywinski plans to adapt this platform for other autonomous applications, like “patrol robots for security.” Which sounds like a bit of an escalation from mowing the lawns, honestly.

Quick question: What’s to stop someone nicking this puppy off my front lawn?

Song of the Day: Haute & Freddy, ‘Touch Touch’

This highly anticipated new single from L.A. alt-pop duo Haute & Freddy, is a triumphant, '80s-inspired synth-pop anthem that balances shameless escapism with deep emotional vulnerability. Their first new material since their acclaimed March debut album Big Disgrace, the track builds on the duo's signature theatrical charm, so it’s a lot like this newsletter.

Rich Folks Are Flocking to Dollar Stores

Forget your yacht club membership and artisanal cheese shop. In 2026, the ultimate flex for wealthy Americans is bragging about the absolute steal they got on off-brand laundry detergent.

Yes, inflation and volatile gas prices have accomplished what decades of social policy couldn’t: Uniting Americans of all income brackets in the hallowed, fluorescent aisles of Dollar General $DG ( ▼ 2.38% ) and Dollar Tree $DLTR ( ▲ 0.99% ) .

According to Dollar General’s CEO, Todd Vasos, even their usual clientele is feeling the pinch. “Our core customers continue to be financially constrained,” Vasos told the Wall Street Journal, noting that “higher and more volatile fuel prices have forced customers to further prioritize purchases with a focus on value and affordability.”

And prioritize they did. The undisputed crown jewel of this economic survival mode is Dollar General’s poetically named Value Valley — a dedicated $1 zone where sales surged 16 percent last quarter. “The consumer is relying more on that $1 price point,” Vasos admitted, with plans to expand the section to over 9,000 stores.

Over at Dollar Tree, CEO Mike Creedon is also watching well-to-do shoppers raid his shelves, noting that “the inflationary backdrop continues to pressure all household budgets.” Indeed, Dollar Tree’s sales gains are currently being driven by middle- and high-income households looking to stretch their dollars.

Of course, a massive corporate turf war is brewing. Giants like Walmart $WMT ( ▲ 0.45% ) and Target $TGT ( ▼ 1.66% ) are aggressively slashing prices to steal these newly frugal shoppers back. Walmart's CEO, John Furner, practically swore a blood oath to investors, promising, “We’ll do everything we can to keep prices as low as we can... throughout the rest of the year.” Whether the dollar stores can hold off these behemoths is, as Deutsche Bank $DB ( ▲ 0.72% ) analyst Krisztina Katai put it, “the big question.”

Until then, we’ll see you in Value Valley.

Free Yourself From Advertising Forever!

People Are Planning To Skip Work To Play GTA6

If you are a manager currently congratulating yourself on surviving "quiet quitting," brace yourself. On November 19 at midnight, a cataclysmic event is going to completely wipe out your firm’s Q4 productivity. No, it’s not a new supply chain crisis (although that could still happen, too!), it’s the release of Grand Theft Auto VI. After an agonizing 13-year drought, eager gamers have officially deemed the launch an unofficial holiday and are hoarding their PTO accordingly.

Take Bud Burruss, a 36-year-old software engineer and father of three. He is taking five days off to lock himself inside his "cave," he told the Wall Street Journal. “We’ve got a couple of days where we’re like, ‘Daddy’s very busy,’” he warns. While he promises his wife (who has known about this commitment for over a year) that he won't play “like an absentee father,” he admits “right out of the gate we’re going hard.”

Meanwhile, Anna Ray, a 30-year-old medical-sales rep and professional wrestler, is taking a full week off. For her, the release is about “getting to be like a little kid again, living out that inner child but at 30 years old.” She’s even pre-cooking steak and salmon so she doesn't have to waste time cooking or opening her work laptop. Over in Brazil, civil servant Guilherme Stephano is checking out for an entire 10 days because, as he puts it, “I’m a completionist.”

Likewise, good luck to any boss expecting spreadsheets to get done in late November….

Should You Check Your 401(k) Today?

👎️ 

Nope.

Poll of the Day: Cuttin’ Up

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