BUSINESS

The Trump administration has been progressively shrinking AHRQ, the only federal agency focused on supporting research to improve the safety and quality of healthcare.

Woodside Energy a leading Australian oil and gas company reported a modest 7% profit increase in the June half year, adding to speculation of a takeover bid

Electrification of warfare has outrun that of the military. Advances are underway, but China’s advantage is large in hybrid/EVs. Many hurdles exist, including politics.

Walmart shoppers are increasingly treating the world’s largest retailer like an e-commerce company, and that is beginning to change which numbers matter most to investors.

In its recent second-quarter earnings, the retail giant Walmart’s U.S. comparable sales rose just 2.6%, its slowest pace in six years and below Wall Street expectations. 

The miss sent Walmart shares down more than 9% on August 20, even though the retailer raised its full-year sales and profit outlook.

The stock has recovered only slightly since the selloff. 

Walmart closed at $103.70 on August 21 and was trading around $106 intraday on Monday, August 24. 

Shares are down over 7% this past week and over 11% in the past quarter. Walmart is also down 4.86% year to date, although the stock remains 9.47% higher over the past year.

Its 52-week high, recorded in May, was $135.16, well above its current stock price of $106.49.

But in a note shared with TheStreet, Bank of America argues that investors focusing on Walmart’s slowing comparable sales may be overlooking a bigger shift unfolding beneath the surface.

The bank maintained its Buy rating following the sell-off, noting that Walmart’s digital indicators remain healthy enough to support longer-term market share gains and profit growth. 

BofA lowered its price target to $126 from $144, partly due to a weaker U.S. comparable-sales forecast.

But the new target still represents more than 20% upside from the stock price at the time of publication.

The reason for BofA’s optimism has less to do with what happens at Walmart’s checkout lanes than with what happens after a customer taps “order.”

Walmart’s e-commerce business keeps accelerating

Global e-commerce sales increased 23% in the quarter, extending a multiyear run of digital growth. 

Walmart U.S. e-commerce grew 24%, Sam’s Club U.S. climbed 26%, and Walmart International increased 19%.

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The U.S. numbers are more striking beneath the headline.

Store-fulfilled delivery sales increased more than 40%

Average weekly e-commerce customers rose more than 20%

Marketplace sales grew more than 50%

Walmart’s marketplace alone grew 52% during the quarter.

BofA sees those businesses as parts of a wider digital “flywheel.” 

Global advertising climbed 38%, membership revenue increased 17%, and Walmart+ members spend about four times as much as nonmembers, according to BofA.

Those operations also carry different economics than simply selling another carton of milk or a television inside a Supercenter.

Walmart said its U.S. e-commerce business produced double-digit incremental margins during the first half of the year, aided by advertising, membership, greater delivery density, automation, and customers paying for faster delivery.

This is relevant because Walmart has spent years growing online sales while trying to bring down the cost of fulfilling those orders.

The equation is starting to change.

“Digital is driving our growth, customer spend, and market share gains across all operating segments,” John Rainey, CFO, Walmart, told investors, adding that Walmart can expand those capabilities at a lower marginal cost.

Walmart’s stock is down 4.8% year-to-date.Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Walmart’s stores are becoming delivery hubs

The biggest weapon in Walmart’s online push may be the same thing that has historically set it apart from other internet retailers: thousands of physical stores.

More than 23% of Walmart U.S. sales now come through e-commerce, double the share five years ago.

Yet Walmart says its stores become more important as that percentage rises, not less.

Stores now serve as the last-mile fulfillment point for 80% of Walmart’s e-commerce orders and all of its fast deliveries, according to Rainey.

That turns Walmart’s brick-and-mortar footprint into a network of fulfillment points close to customers.

The company expanded its delivery to less than 30 minutes in 38 U.S. markets during the quarter. 

Fast delivery grew 48%, with orders spanning fresh and frozen food, pharmacy products, fashion, and general merchandise.

Walmart CEO John Furner said speed is becoming more than a logistics achievement.

“Speed isn’t simply a fulfillment metric, it’s an acquisition strategy.”

Customers who use fast delivery shops at Walmart more frequently, engage more with the company, and are more likely to become Walmart+ members, according to Walmart.

TheStreet previously reported on another piece of that strategy as Walmart began experimenting with dedicated delivery depots in smaller properties, including former drugstores.

Those roughly 20,000-square-foot locations stock frequently ordered goods closer to customers and allow delivery drivers to collect orders without having to navigate a full Supercenter. 

Amazon and Walmart race toward same customer

This increasingly puts Walmart head-to-head with Amazon in a part of retail where Walmart has historically held the stronger position: groceries and everyday essentials.

Amazon has been moving in the opposite direction, bringing inventory closer to shoppers as it expands its grocery delivery faster.

The two retailers are therefore attacking essentially the same problem from different starting points.

Amazon built the country’s dominant e-commerce operation and is trying to move closer to consumers.

Walmart already has roughly 4,600 U.S. stores and is turning more of that real estate into e-commerce infrastructure.

Its store network puts 95% of the country within a three-hour delivery range.

The battleground is increasingly not whether consumers shop online, but which retailer can deliver groceries, prescriptions, or everyday household items fast.

Wall Street divided over Walmart’s slowdown

Walmart’s weaker U.S. comparable sales have nevertheless raised questions about how much investors should pay for that future growth.

Deutsche Bank lowered its Walmart price target to $113 from $120 and maintained a Hold rating.

The firm called the earnings report a “tough day for the WMT bull narrative.” 

Further noting that the slowdown challenges the prevailing bull case, given Walmart’s premium valuation.

Telsey Advisory cut its target to $130 from $140 while retaining an Outperform rating, pointing to continued omnichannel growth but greater pressure from pharmacy pricing and higher fuel costs.

Morgan Stanley lowered its target to $125 from $140 but maintained an Overweight rating, arguing that e-commerce momentum and underlying operating-income growth remain intact.

JPMorgan also cut its target to $125 from $137 while keeping an Overweight rating and called the post-earnings decline a “good time to buy.”

Roth Capital, which retained a Buy rating and $138 target, went further. 

It argued that as Walmart’s business expands beyond brick-and-mortar retail, comparable sales are becoming a less important measure of its operating performance.

BofA reaches a similar conclusion.

The firm called the slowdown in U.S. comps disappointing but pointed to marketplace, advertising, and membership growth as evidence that Walmart’s broader digital strategy remains intact.

Walmart’s numbers increasingly support that argument.

Fee-based fast deliveries represented a record 37% of store-fulfilled deliveries during the quarter, while more than half of e-commerce fulfillment volume now passes through automated facilities.

Walmart is therefore not simply selling more products online.

It is getting faster at delivering them, generating more revenue around those transactions, and improving its digital operation, which once weighed on profitability.

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Nvidia has spent the past two years building the hardware behind almost every major AI breakthrough. Increasingly, it has also been writing checks to the companies using that hardware, turning itself into one of the most active investors in the entire AI ecosystem.

A new report put a fresh number on just how far that strategy might extend, and it points to one of the most closely watched startups in AI search.

Nvidia in talks to invest in Perplexity AI at $30 billion valuation

Nvidia is discussing an investment in Perplexity as part of an equity round that would value the AI startup at more than $30 billion, citing people familiar with the discussions, The Information reported on Sunday, Aug. 23. Reuters carried the report, saying it could not immediately verify the details itself.

The potential funding round would mark a sharp jump for Perplexity. The startup’s valuation sat at roughly $20 billion after a funding round finalized last year, meaning a $30 billion valuation would represent an increase of more than 50% in about 12 months, according to Investing.com.

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This is not a new relationship; Nvidia has had money in Perplexity since 2023. In July, Perplexity went further and committed to running its AI agent workloads on Nvidia’s Vera CPUs.

The Information also reported something worth noting: Nvidia had at one point considered a licensing arrangement or the possibility of hiring some of Perplexity’s team, rather than taking an equity stake. That conversation shifted, as the current talks are about equity.

Perplexity’s other backers add to the profile of any new round. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Japan’s SoftBank Group are both existing investors in the company, placing any new Nvidia commitment alongside some of the most recognizable names in global tech investing.

Perplexity AI revenue growth and the $30 billion valuation case

The financial case for a higher valuation rests on genuine growth, not just AI hype. Perplexity’s annualized revenue has climbed to more than $750 million, up from less than $250 million at the start of the year, a threefold jump in roughly eight months, according to Reuters.

Part of that growth traces back to a specific product. Perplexity Computer, a cloud-based AI agent that professionals use to automate computer-based tasks, has been a meaningful driver of the recent revenue surge.

Separately, in January, Perplexity signed a three-year, $750 million spending commitment with Microsoft to access AI models through Azure’s Foundry program (a cost arrangement, not a revenue source), giving it access to systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI while keeping Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider.

Perplexity has also become a recognizable name well beyond Silicon Valley. The company ranks among the top AI chatbots by market share, competing directly against ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in the AI search race.

CEO Aravind Srinivas has kept the company’s ambitions public and specific. According to Benzinga, he told CNBC in June that Perplexity plans to pursue an initial public offering in 2028, regardless of how planned listings from OpenAI and Anthropic play out.

The timeline would put a $30 billion valuation round roughly two years ahead of its planned public listing.

Nvidia has had money in Perplexity since 2023.Jose/Getty Images

Nvidia circular financing concerns and the Stacy Rasgon debate

This would not be an isolated move for Nvidia (NVDA). The company has become one of the most aggressive corporate investors in AI, backing startups including OpenAI, xAI, and Safe Superintelligence.

It has also funding cloud infrastructure providers including CoreWeave and Nebius, companies whose businesses depend heavily on deploying Nvidia’s computing systems.

That pattern has a name on Wall Street, and not always a flattering one. Critics describe it as circular financing, because Nvidia can invest in AI companies or infrastructure providers that subsequently use the capital to help fund purchases of Nvidia’s chips.

Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon has flagged it repeatedly as a source of investor unease around Nvidia’s largest AI deals.

TheStreet co-editor-in-chief Todd Campbell has framed the strategy in less alarmist terms, as TheStreet reported. He argued that Nvidia needs to keep demand growing to justify its own scale while helping build out a genuinely competitive AI marketplace, rather than a single-vendor monopoly.

A Perplexity investment would look smaller than Nvidia’s biggest recent commitments, which have run into the tens of billions of dollars for companies like OpenAI. Even so, any confirmed deal would add another data point to a growing list that investors are already tracking closely heading into Nvidia’s next earnings report.

What NVDA investors should watch ahead of Aug. 26 earnings

Nvidia reports fiscal second-quarter results on Aug. 26.

Investors will be watching for any development confirming or denying the Perplexity talks that could surface around that date, even if the company declines to comment on specific negotiations beforehand. Analysts have remained broadly bullish heading into the report, regardless of the Perplexity news.

Bank of America’s Vivek Arya has a $350 price target on Nvidia, arguing that shares remain attractively valued relative to the company’s free cash flow generation, even after concerns surrounding its growing financing commitments tied to AI infrastructure, as TheStreet reported.

Oppenheimer has separately maintained an Outperform rating and $265 price target, citing Nvidia’s strong growth prospects and attractive valuation relative to that growth.

For investors in either company, the practical signal to watch is whether this deal closes and on what terms.

A completed investment tied to infrastructure commitments, similar to the Vera CPU agreement from July, would say more about Nvidia’s long-term strategy than a purely financial stake. It would also give Perplexity more data to point to as it builds toward its own eventual public listing.

Related: Oppenheimer has a blunt Nvidia stock message ahead of earnings

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Just when it seemed like Target had turned the page on its controversies, a powerful new advocacy group is taking aim at the retailer.

Target reported negative comps last year as it faced backlash after cutting back its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. That decision was prompted by backlash against its pro-DEI policies. Somehow, Target became the lightning rod for a couple of opposing political movements.

“Target spent two years getting dragged over culture-war noise. They flipped the script by dropping the fluff and focusing on why people actually walk into their stores every week: groceries and essentials,” RTM Nexus CEO Dominick Miserandino recently told TheStreet.

“Foot traffic is back, food sales are up, and same-day fulfillment is carrying the load. They stopped trying to be a fancy department store alternative and started acting like a reliable everyday hub.”

But now, Target is facing new boycott calls from the American Federation of Teachers, a powerful union that features nearly 1.9 million members, in the middle of the important back-to-school shopping season.

National teachers’ labor union calls for Target back-to-school boycott

With parents getting ready to send their kids back to school across the country, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is launching its “Shop Smart, Support Working Families” campaign, which urges teachers and families to shop at retailers other than Target for school supplies.

AFT is asking its 1.87 million members and 3,000 local affiliates to avoid shopping at Target due to the company’s stance on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detentions at its stores.

According to the AFT, its members spend an average of $895 of their own money on school supplies each year and hold billions in Target stock via their pension funds. The group passed a resolution in March demanding that the Minneapolis-based company speak up against “ICE atrocities in their own backyard.”

ICE officers were part of a high-profile detention action in the city that resulted in massive protests inside their Minneapolis stores, CBS News shared in a post on X (the former Twitter).

In February, the BBC reported that more than 300 staff signed an internal letter urging executives to speak out against ICE and take steps to keep ICE officers off Target properties.

AFT President Randi Weingarten also wrote to Target CEO Michael Fiddelke twice outlining the union’s concerns about ICE operations at Target, but did not receive a response.

Related: Target admits it still has big problems to fix

“We gave Target ample time to stand with the communities in which they operate and help their neighbors, but its silence about federal immigration abuses has been deafening,” said Weingarten, according to WNYLaborToday.

“The issue could not be more pressing: Seven months since the murders of Alex Pretti and Renée Good, masked ICE agents are still in our streets, our schools and our communities, terrorizing families in the name of Donald Trump’s illegal and immoral assault on immigrants striving for their American Dream. That’s why we’re urging our members to avoid Target and patronize more ethical shopping alternatives this back-to-school season.”

Target did not immediately return a request for comment from TheStreet.

The national teachers’ union is asking its 1.87 million members and 3,000 local affiliates to avoid shopping at Target this back-to-school season.Scott Olson / Getty Images

AFT helps members avoid Target

It wouldn’t be much of a boycott if the AFT didn’t provide shopping alternatives outside of Target, so the organization created ShopSmart.AFT.org.

There, members can submit their ZIP codes to get mapped results of “community-friendly” back-to-school shopping options, including unionized businesses, that the AFT promises have “price points comparable to Target’s.”

“We’re disappointed that Target has failed to live up to its promises to be a good neighbor to the families who have shopped there for years,” said Natasha Dockter, vice president of the teacher chapter of Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, as The Minnesota Star Tribune reported.

“That’s why I’m proud to join with my union family to shop local this fall and skip Target until its executives reconsider and join their voices with ours.”

The AFT says its members spend hundreds of millions of dollars at Target annually and its pension funds, which hold an estimated $4 trillion in assets, hold direct ownership of nearly 6.8 million Target shares.

Target knows back-to-school season is important

Students going back to school and college need supplies, and for decades, Target has been one of the cheapest options for families looking to make sure their students are well-prepared for the upcoming school year.

Target executives kept mentioning the back-to-school season on the company’s most recent earnings call.

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They highlighted the reason why Target is so popular during the season, declaring that 95% of its school supplies are priced at or below last year’s prices. The company’s third-quarter earnings call will undoubtedly be focused on its performance during these important shopping weeks.

“We would probably fill up the rest of the time talking about back-to-school and back-to-college. I think it might be a favorite season of some of those on the call here,” Target CEO Michael Fiddelke said on the call. “And to hear our guests play back what they’re excited about gives us confidence that what we’re offering for back-to-school and back-to-college is really resonating.”

The company said it was seeing “broad-based strength in everything from school supplies to kids’ apparel,” highlighting that the season is about more than just notebooks and pencils, but also extends into other items such as makeup, clothing, and food.

Related: Target pledges price cuts as sales grow

Every empire eventually discovers that its most useful weapon is not a weapon. Rome had roads. The United States has plumbing.

Not literal plumbing. The wiring that moves money between banks, the correspondent accounts, the clearing systems, and the settlement rails that nobody thinks about until they stop working.

Almost every cross-border trade of any size touches a dollar somewhere in its life. That means almost every bank of any size needs a way into the American financial system, and that way in has always been conditional in theory.

It is rarely made conditional in practice. Doing so is expensive, loud, and tends to push people toward building alternatives you cannot see.

For most of this year, the conditionality stayed theoretical. The war that began in February throttled shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a June memorandum was supposed to settle how the waterway would be run, and it did not hold.

Talks stalled this month, crude climbed more than 5% in a week, and Washington kept promising something bigger.

On Monday, Aug. 24, the bigger thing arrived. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood in the Cash Room at the Treasury Department and launched Operation Economic Outcast, a campaign the administration has been calling an “economic D-Day.”

Then the oil market did something the announcement did not seem to account for. It went down.

Why Iran sanctions run through the Strait of Hormuz

Sanctions on Iran are not new. They are one of the most heavily layered sanctions regimes on earth, and Tehran has spent decades building workarounds.

What changes the math is the waterway. The Strait once carried about a fifth of global oil supply, according to Reuters, which makes any disruption there a global price event rather than a regional one.

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That is the mechanism worth understanding before anything else. Washington is not trying to make oil expensive. It is trying to make Iranian oil unsellable while keeping everyone else’s oil moving, and those two goals sit on top of the same shipping lane.

The tool for splitting them is the secondary sanction. A primary sanction says an American cannot do business with Iran. A secondary sanction says a Malaysian refiner or a Chinese bank cannot do business with Iran and keep its access to the dollar system.

The second kind is the one with teeth, because it converts a bilateral fight into a choice every finance ministry has to make on its own.

Treasury has been working this angle all year. Its Aug. 24 action was at least the eighth of 2026 aimed at Iran’s shadow banking apparatus, including front companies, exchange houses, major financiers, and the importers and exporters who launder and repatriate revenue, according to the Treasury Department.

Bessent’s Operation Economic Outcast threatens dollar access for any country still trading with Iran.Jose A. Bernat Bacete / Getty Images

What Operation Economic Outcast actually does

The operation expands the categories that trigger secondary sanctions into five sectors Bessent identified as Iran’s remaining lifelines: digital assets, technology, gold, aviation and shipping.

Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control simultaneously designated nearly 60 entities, individuals, and vessels tied to nuclear and missile procurement, cyber operations, and oil smuggling, reported Axios.

Bessent tied the framing directly to 1944. “We are launching an economic onslaught against Iran’s financial connections around the globe,” he said, according to CBS News.

The threat underneath the announcement is blunter than the sector list suggests. Any entity that launders money for Iran loses access to the dollar system, and countries that keep the trade running should expect to share Iran’s isolation.

Brent crude fell about 2.5% to $92.06 a barrel on Aug. 24, the day of the announcement, according to CNBC.

Brent had traded as low as $71 in June before inventory draws and a longer-running disruption pushed it back up, Reuters reported.

Morgan Stanley raised its Brent forecast and now projects a peak near $100 in the fourth quarter, according to Reuters.

The national average for regular gasoline hit $4.10 on Aug. 20, the highest ever recorded on that date, and August 2026 is on track to be the most expensive August at the pump on record, AAA noted.

He declined to name the countries under pressure or publish their deadlines, describing the approach as quiet diplomacy. He also said he expects a major financial institution to be sanctioned by the end of the week.

The unstated target is not hard to identify. China has historically bought roughly 90% of Iran’s exported crude, which makes Chinese banks the load-bearing wall of the entire evasion network.

Bessent’s argument is that “total financial isolation” could make military force unnecessary, he told reporters, according to the Washington Post.

The question is what the operation is being launched into.

What a $93 barrel means for your gas bill

I ran the day’s price action against the announcement timeline, and the sequence is hard to miss. The most aggressive sanctions package the Treasury has ever described landed, and the commodity it was designed to squeeze sold off.

Traders were taking profits after two strong weeks. The deeper read came from SEB analyst Bjarne Schieldrop, who argued that a $93 barrel rather than a $120 one tells you “enough oil is flowing through the Strait of Hormuz,” he told Reuters.

Translated: The market has already priced a partially blocked Strait. It has not priced a closed one, and the Monday, Aug. 24 announcement did not change its estimate of the odds.

Related: Iran de-escalation just hit energy stocks

That distinction matters more to your budget than any sanctions list. The national average climbed 28 cents between July 6 and Aug. 5 alone, according to AAA data compiled by ChooseEnergy.

For a household burning 100 gallons a month, my analysis puts that at roughly $28 in additional fuel spending inside four weeks, and that was before the Aug. 24 announcement.

That is not a portfolio problem. That is a grocery-budget problem, and it lands whether or not you own a single energy stock.

For investors, the setup is genuinely awkward. Integrated majors such as Exxon Mobil (XOM) and Chevron (CVX) benefit from a tighter barrel, while nearly everything else in a diversified portfolio prefers cheap energy and a calm inflation print.

Higher crude also complicates the rate path, which is why the timing of the next Fed interest-rate move has become such a contested question on the desk.

The bond market Bessent still has to answer to

There is a second front here that got almost no attention on Aug. 24.

The same Treasury secretary threatening to eject foreign banks from the dollar system spent last week trying to persuade the bond market to calm down about American debt.

Treasury said on Aug. 19 it would at least double its longer-dated buyback operations, from $2 billion to at least $4 billion. The larger operations begin Sept. 9, according to CNBC.

Bessent confirmed that not a single bond has been purchased under the expanded program yet.

Those two projects are in tension. The dollar’s weaponization is only credible because the world has nowhere better to park money, and the 30-year yield recently sat at levels last seen before the 2008 financial crisis.

Every time Washington demonstrates that dollar access can be revoked, it hands a talking point to whoever is building the alternative. That cost does not show up on any sanctions list, and it does not show up next quarter.

I am watching three things from here. Whether the major financial institution Bessent promised actually gets designated this week, and whether any named country publicly complies.

I’m also looking at whether Brent breaks $100, the level where the pump stops being an annoyance and starts being a political problem.

The Strait is still open. That is the only number the oil market is trading, and until that changes, an economic D-Day is a headline in Washington and a rounding error in Rotterdam.

Related: Scott Bessent sends strong message on oil price and Iran