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Markets almost never get a referee before they need one.

The Securities and Exchange Commission showed up after 1929 had already wiped out a generation of savers. The private body that polices your broker today grew out of that same wreckage.

That order of operations is expensive. By the time the rules arrive, the losses have been spread across everyone, and the people who absorbed them rarely got a vote.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has never had a referee at all. No federal agency tests a frontier model before it ships. No independent group verifies that a system can do what its maker claims, or something its maker never intended.

The only check that exists is a company’s own word about its own product.

For most of this year, that looked like it might finally change. White House officials spent the summer working through a proposal for a national AI standards body, and briefed the largest labs on it in mid-August.

Then three men picked up the phone, and the plan stopped moving.

What a FINRA-style AI regulator would have actually done

The idea came from Demis Hassabis, chief scientist at Alphabet (GOOGL) and chair of its DeepMind unit. He wanted an independent group that could test frontier models before release, staffed with experts capable of probing systems for dangerous cyber, biological and deceptive capabilities.

His model was the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, the private nonprofit that writes and enforces rules for U.S. brokerages under Securities and Exchange Commission supervision. Member firms fund it, and the SEC reviews its rule changes.

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The AI version would have worked the same way. Labs pay in, a common testing standard gets written, and models get measured against it before deployment.

Critics inside the industry made a narrow, honest objection. Voluntary review has a habit of turning into mandatory review, and a model sitting in a testing queue is a model earning nothing.

Why Zuckerberg, Musk, and Huang opposed the AI oversight body

Meta (META) CEO Zuckerberg, SpaceXAI’s Musk, and Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Huang each spoke with Trump separately last month and convinced him to drop the plan, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, Sept. 16. Trump did not move forward, a decision that frustrated some White House officials.

Their stated objection was not that oversight is bad. It was that this particular oversight would hand permanent advantage to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, the three labs already closest to the center of the policy fight, reported Forbes.

Administration officials have since told AI executives that building consensus at the White House is difficult when chief executives can call the president directly, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Related: AI Could Blow a Hole in the Federal Budget

The public version of the argument landed Tuesday, Sept. 15. Companies have a “strong natural incentive” to keep AI aligned with human interests because nobody uses an agent that ignores them, Zuckerberg wrote in an X post.

Every lab, he added, has “the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely.”

Huang was blunter at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference the same day. The choice between safety and speed is “false,” he said, and “we don’t need new laws, we don’t need new regulations,” according to the event video.

What FINRA’s own numbers say about the entrenchment argument

This is where my analysis parts company with most of the coverage I read on this topic. The entrenchment claim got treated as a convenient excuse. I checked it against what the FINRA model actually did to its own industry, and it holds up better than the three CEOs may realize.

FINRA member firms fell roughly 6% to 3,184 in 2025, according to the regulator’s 2026 Industry Snapshot.

Small firms absorbed nearly the entire decline, dropping to 2,832 from 3,048, per the same report.

Large firms held roughly flat near 155, while registered representatives grew to 639,723, according to FINRA.

Fewer firms, more people inside them. That is what a member-funded standards body looks like after 18 years, and FINRA lists regulatory costs among the drivers of that concentration.

So the case Zuckerberg, Musk and Huang made to Trump is defensible. What it does not explain is why the three loudest opponents of a regulatory moat already sit on three of the widest moats in the industry.

The cost side is stranger still. I put FINRA’s roughly $1.5 billion annual budget against Nvidia’s last quarter, and a full year of policing 3,184 brokerages works out to about 1.6% of the $96.2 billion Nvidia booked in three months.

This was never a fight about a membership fee. It was a fight about the calendar, and about who decides when a model is ready.

Nvidia, Meta, and SpaceXAI chiefs urged Trump to drop a FINRA-style AI oversight body.KENT NISHIMURA / Getty Images

What no AI referee means for your portfolio from here

Blocking a federal body did not leave a clean slate. It left the alternative.

States enacted 109 AI laws and 28 data center laws in the first half of 2026, following 159 AI laws in 2025, according to TechPolicy.Press. Trump’s December executive order created a Justice Department task force whose sole job is challenging those laws.

One standards body with published criteria is something a chief financial officer can budget for. Fifty jurisdictions and a docket of preemption suits is not.

That distinction reaches your account whether you follow AI policy or not. Nvidia closed at $219.34 on Sept. 17, worth roughly $5.3 trillion, and Huang said Thursday he expects to sell twice as many chips next year as this year.

Meta and Nvidia sit among the heaviest weights in the index funds inside most 401(k) plans. So here is the part worth sitting with.

When you own that fund, you are underwriting a safety claim that now has exactly one source behind it, which is the company making it. There is no outside tester and no published standard to check it against when something breaks.

Zuckerberg may be right that market incentives do the job, and Huang may be right that existing law is enough. Neither has to show his work, and that is what actually changed in a phone call last month.

Watch next week. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Huang are both expected at the White House State Dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the administration is “open to discussions on avoiding shared risks” with China on AI, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Axios on Wednesday, Sept. 16.

An industry that would not accept a domestic referee is about to talk safety standards with Beijing. Someone in that room is going to notice.

Related: China suspects ulterior motive for U.S. AI slowdown

“Shawn the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom,” the latest stop-motion animated movie from Aardman Animations, is getting bleating great reviews from Rotten Tomatoes critics.

Sheeran is expected to receive a less-than-warm welcome at his first concert since all of his opening acts quit in support of Macklemore.

Pricing alone does not decide where people buy their clothes.

With a number of retail chains competing for the off-price, on-trend fashion crown, it’s easy for one brand to fall out of favor. Consumers seem to have an enduring love for Marshalls and TJ Maxx, while the popularity of Ross Dress for Less has grown steadily in recent years.

These brands drive sales by foot traffic, and that’s a battle the aforementioned chains have been winning.

“Off-price apparel remained on solid footing in Q2 2026, with Ross leading the segment. Visits to Ross Dress for Less rose 16.4% year over year (YoY), while dd’s DISCOUNTS grew 8.4%. TJX’s TJ Maxx and Marshalls, meanwhile, saw visits hover around last year’s levels — significantly outperforming traditional apparel, which declined 3.5% YoY,” according to data from Placer.ai.

In the battle for customers looking for deals on trendy, fashionable clothes, Cato has been struggling, and now plans to close about 15% of its retail stores.

Cato has lost sales

The Cato Corporation reported net income of $1.1 million in the second quarter, compared to net income of $6.8 million for the second quarter, which ended Aug. 2, 2025. 

Sales for the second quarter 2026 were $163.9 million, or a decrease of 6% from sales of $174.7 million for the second quarter ended Aug. 2, 2025, primarily due to a 3.7% same-store sales decrease for the quarter compared to 2025.

The company blamed its customers for the drop.

“Our results in the quarter are in large part due to the continued pressure on our customers’ discretionary income, which is being negatively impacted in part by persistent inflation, higher fuel prices and continued elevated interest rates,” CEO John Cato said in the earnings release.

It’s a situation he does not see improving anytime soon.

“We expect the negative pressure on our customers’ discretionary income to continue for the foreseeable future. We will continue to tightly manage our expenses and inventory as we anticipate the back half of 2026 to be challenging.”

The chain’s rivals, however, tell a different story.

Ross Dress for Less sales for the second quarter of fiscal 2026 increased 13% versus last year, with comparable store sales up 10%, primarily driven by customer traffic.

Marshalls and TJ Maxx, which TJX reports on jointly, reported a 1% same-store sales increase and a 3% jump in overall sales.

Cato plans more store closures

Cato has expanded its plan to close down underperforming stores. It’s adding 70 new closures to the list of locations that will close before the end of the company’s fourth quarter, bringing the total planned shutdowns to 120, according to a press release.

The chain, John Cato noted, looks at a third of its retail base every year to decide whether to exercise available lease options or negotiate an extension based on each store’s performance, including store sales trends and current and projected store profitability.

“In years past, marginal stores were renewed for an additional year to give the store more time to improve its sales trend and profitability. In light of the current economic environment, especially with the negative pressure on our customers’ discretionary income, we do not expect these marginal stores to improve appreciably,” he said.

Ross stores offer continually changing merchandise.Shutterstock

Ross may have an edge over its rivals

Morningstar analysts believe Ross Dress for Less’ roughly 2,200 stores give it an advantage over smaller competitors such as Cato, which operated more than 800 stores before the planned closures.

“As the second-largest off-price retailer in the U.S. with about 30% market share, we think Ross Stores’ unique inventory procurement method and scale positions the firm to comfortably expand its top line at a mid-single-digit pace while fending off competition from online channels in the future,” the analysts shared in a research note.

Size matters, as does the relationship Ross has built with its suppliers.

“We suggest that Ross’ standing as a reliable sales outlet for product manufacturers and traditional (or full-price) retailers looking to discreetly liquidate excess inventory should provide the firm with a plethora of buying opportunities,” Morningstar added.

Cato is trying to sell affordable, on-trend women’s fashion. Ross and the TJX brands are playing the same value game, but with a much larger buying operation and access to merchandise from manufacturers and full-price retailers looking to clear excess inventory.

“As fashion evolves, one thing remains the same — our commitment to putting women’s confidence first. For 80 years, Cato has helped women look and feel their best with stylish, affordable fashion for every occasion,” the chain shared on its website.

Off-price has been growing

With many Americans struggling financially, it’s easy to see why off-price name brand clothing would appeal to more people. GlobalData Managing Director Neil Saunders, however, commented on TJX, Ross, and Burlington, which he called the three biggest players in the space, a year ago on his LinkedIn page.

“Since 2019, the three main chains all delivered US sales growth in excess of 30%. By contrast, the total market for the things they sell — mostly fashion and home — grew by just 21.7% over the 2019 to 2024 period. In other words, they’ve all expanded their market share,” he wrote.

He thinks that those three companies have steadily earned consumer trust.

“All of this is a testament to the skill of the off-price teams. Yes, things like value for money and bargain hunting are very much in their favor. But consistently delivering on these consumer requirements is far from easy. The effort, knowledge, and judgment involved are immense,” he added.

The closing Cato stores, the company shared, all have expiring leases, so the cost of rent for those locations will come off the retailer’s books by the end of 2026.

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The sticker price on a phone stopped being the price anyone actually pays a long time ago.

What you pay is a blend of a trade-in credit, a monthly installment, a plan tier you may not have chosen on your own, and a commitment that outlasts most car leases.

That structure is why two people can buy the identical phone in the same week and pay very different amounts for it. One trades in a three-year-old handset on a premium unlimited plan and pays almost nothing each month. The other buys outright and pays full retail on the spot.

Apple (AAPL) raised the price of its Pro iPhones by $100 this year. The Pro starts at $1,199 and the Pro Max at $1,299, and for a lot of households that jump is the difference between upgrading now and waiting another year.

Then the three major U.S. carriers made their counteroffer, and Bank of America (BAC) spent this week working out what it is really worth to you.

Bank of America says carrier trade-in credits hit $1,200 on the iPhone 18 Pro Max.TIMOTHY A. CLARY / Getty Images

How carrier trade-in credits actually reach your bill

Carrier promotions work as credits rather than discounts, and that distinction decides how much cash leaves your account on day one.

When a carrier advertises $1,200 off, the full retail price of the phone goes onto a 36-month installment plan, and the credit comes back to your bill in monthly slices across those same 36 months.

Related: Bank of America flags surprising iPhone 18 pre-order trend

Leave early and the remaining credits stop. That structure is the point, because it keeps you on the account and on a plan tier that bills more each month than an entry-level one.

Apple sells the same phones outright with no strings. The trade-off is that you pay for all of it at once.

What the $1,200 iPhone 18 trade-in credit actually covers

Maximum trade-in credits for the iPhone 18 Pro Max have climbed to $1,200 at Verizon (VZ), AT&T (T) and T-Mobile (TMUS), Bank of America analyst Wamsi Mohan wrote in a Sept. 17 research note.

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That is $100 more than the top credit on the iPhone 17 Pro Max last year and $200 more than the iPhone 16 Pro Max the year before. The richer promotions largely cancel out Apple’s price increase, according to Mohan.

Here is the part that matters at the register. Even at the maximum credit, you are not walking out for nothing.

Carriers charge an activation or upgrade fee of $35 to $40, and sales tax is calculated on the full retail price of the phone rather than the discounted amount. On BofA’s figures, using New York City sales tax, that lands at $142 to $147 for the Pro and $250 to $255 for the Pro Max.

What you actually pay upfront for an iPhone 18

iPhone 18 Pro: $142 to $147 in fees and tax, or $291 to $296 with AppleCare+, according to Bank of America.

iPhone 18 Pro Max: $250 to $255 in fees and tax, or $400 to $405 with AppleCare+, according to Bank of America.

Activation or upgrade fee: $35 at AT&T and T-Mobile, $40 at Verizon unless waived, per the carriers’ published terms cited by Android Authority. 

Sales tax: charged on full retail, roughly $107 on the Pro and $115 on the Pro Max, on BofA’s New York City math.

Credit delivery: monthly bill credits across 36 months, per carrier promotion terms, highlighted by Tom’s Guide.

Add AppleCare+ at $150 a year and the upfront total runs $291 to $296 for the iPhone 18 Pro and $400 to $405 for the Pro Max, according to the note. Verizon waives the fee for loyalty and new customers, which is the only line item you can negotiate away.

Which older iPhones qualify for the $1,200 credit

The offers target frequent upgraders. Someone holding a five-year-old handset will not see anything close to the top number.

Verizon and AT&T generally require an iPhone 14 or newer to hit the top credit, while T-Mobile sets the bar at an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, per BofA’s survey of carrier terms. AT&T excludes the 16e.

Condition requirements are loose. AT&T and T-Mobile accept qualifying devices in any condition, and Verizon does the same with the exception of battery damage, which matches the carrier deal roundups at Tom’s Guide.

The catch sits in the plan. Credits at every carrier are tiered by plan, number of lines and customer status, so the advertised number is a ceiling rather than an offer. T-Mobile reserves its full credit for its Experience Beyond and Go5G Next tiers, according to Android Authority.

What the iPhone 18 upgrade cycle means for Apple stock

In my analysis, the interesting thing about this note is that it is an argument about affordability rather than about Apple itself. The carriers absorbed the price increase on Apple’s behalf, in Mohan’s framing.

Early signals have been mixed. Bank of America also found shipping times on the new Pro models running shorter than last year, which usually reads as softer initial demand.

BofA kept a buy rating and a $370 price objective, about 11% above Apple’s $332.41 close on Sept. 16. The firm cut that target from $380 a week earlier, after the iPhone Duo came in cheaper than expected.

What I would watch is whether subsidies this rich show up later as a margin problem for the carriers, or as a churn problem when 36 months of credits run out. For now the benefit sits with Apple, which collects full retail either way.

If you are upgrading, the question that decides your real cost is whether you plan to stay with the same carrier until 2029.

Related: T-Mobile adds monthly fee to a new iPhone feature for customers

Every energy shock teaches the same lesson, and nobody enjoys learning it. When fuel stays expensive long enough, people stop buying it. Not because a rule told them to, but because the math at the pump stopped working.

That math broke in late February, when strikes on Iran began and tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz seized up. Brent crude settled at $104.82 a barrel on Sept. 17, according to CNBC.

The national average for a gallon of regular reached $4.4386 that same day, and diesel in California averaged $8.3496, according to AAA.

Seven months of those prices do predictable things. Airlines thinned schedules, Asian petrochemical plants idled, and car buyers from Jakarta to Berlin went looking for anything with a plug.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) now expects global oil consumption to shrink by 2.5 million barrels per day in 2026, a 2.4% drop from 2025 levels.

Which brings us to a figure published Sept. 16 that the market barely registered. Global emissions from fossil fuels are set to fall by roughly 0.5% this year, according to Carbon Brief.

That would be the first annual decline since the pandemic year of 2020. No treaty produced it.

How the Hormuz shutdown rewired global fuel demand

About a fifth of the world’s oil trade moves through a 21-mile-wide channel between Iran and Oman, along with a similar share of seaborne liquefied natural gas (LNG). Close it, and everything downstream reprices within weeks.

The forecasting record tells this story better than any headline does. In January, the IEA expected global oil demand to grow by 930,000 barrels per day in 2026. By September, it was modeling a 2.5 million barrel per day contraction, according to the IEA.

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I ran those two numbers against each other, and the swing comes to roughly 3.4 million barrels a day in nine months. That is not a forecast being trimmed at the edges. That is a demand curve snapping.

Demand destruction is the polite term for it. Jet fuel got too expensive to fly certain routes. Naphtha got too expensive to crack. Gasoline got too expensive to commute on five days a week.

The scale is without precedent. The agency has called the loss of Gulf barrels the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market, a point TheStreet covered when Exxon’s CEO warned the shock was not fully priced.

Why fossil fuel emissions are set to fall in 2026

The arithmetic is stranger than it first looks, because one fossil fuel is having an excellent year. Expensive gas pushed power systems in Europe, Japan, Korea and China back toward coal, and the resulting jump in coal emissions is “more than offset by declines for oil and gas,” according to Carbon Brief.

Global coal demand is now set to rise 1.2% this year to “a record 8.94 billion tonnes,” according to the IEA, reversing a forecast for a slight decline. Almost no coal moves through Hormuz. The missing LNG cargoes did the work.

Here is how the year’s forecasts have moved:

Oil demand went from growth of 930,000 barrels per day in January to a decline of 2.5 million barrels per day in September, according to the IEA.

Gas demand went from a forecast 2.0% increase in January to a 0.6% drop, according to the IEA’s third-quarter gas report.

Coal demand went from a slight expected decline to a record 8.94 billion tonnes, according to the IEA’s Sept. 10 mid-year update.

Fossil carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions hit a record 38.1 billion tonnes in 2025, according to the Global Carbon Project.

What struck me in my analysis of the emissions record is how little precedent this year has. Fossil CO2 emissions have fallen clearly twice in two decades, in 2009 and 2020, according to the Global Carbon Project.

A banking collapse and a pandemic. The record set in 2025 was announced during COP30, the 30th United Nations climate conference, in Belem, Brazil.

Oil demand is set to fall by 2.5 million barrels daily in 2026, cutting fossil emissions 0.5%.J Studios / Getty Images

What a shrinking demand curve means for energy stocks

Energy equities have spent 2026 pricing the supply shock and ignoring the demand break. The Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLE) traded near $65.83 on Sept. 14 against a 52-week range of $42.35 to $66.17, after a total return of about 53% over the past year, according to StockAnalysis.

Spot barrels and terminal demand are two separate trades, and only one of them is in the price. The IEA now expects oil use to stay close to flat for two years, which puts a question mark over its own call that demand would not peak until 2030.

Every month the conflict runs raises “the probability of permanent demand destruction,” according to consultancy DNV. Electric vehicles (EVs) took record shares of car markets from Australia and China to Indonesia and Thailand this year.

Related: HSBC raises its oil forecast as the Hormuz backup plan burns

For a portfolio, that is the difference between a cyclical win and a structural one. Oil majors such as Exxon Mobil (XOM) have printed refining and trading profits off this crisis, and those profits are real.

The customers are the variable nobody can hedge. Diesel crossed $6 a gallon nationally for the first time on Sept. 11, against about $3.70 a year earlier, according to AAA. Households and fleets that responded by buying something electric, or by driving less, do not automatically unbuy that decision when crude eases.

That is also the quiet risk in owning energy at a 52-week high. The sector is being valued on a barrel count that the agency in charge of counting barrels has stopped forecasting upward.

What to watch before the 2026 emissions drop sticks

Next year is a coin flip that trades on shipping lanes. If LNG flows through Hormuz recover and gas prices ease, global coal demand falls 0.4% to 8.91 billion tonnes in 2027, according to the IEA. If the strait stays shut, coal climbs again.

The Global Carbon Project will publish its next full budget at the end of the year, and that number will tell you whether 0.5% was a blip or a turn.

The world found a way to cut emissions this year. It cost $104 a barrel, a war, a record year for coal, and the first $6 diesel in American history. Nobody is putting that on a banner in Belem.

The number worth watching is not this year’s half a percent. It is how many of the drivers, airlines and utilities that switched decide to stay switched once the tankers sail again.

Related: Scott Bessent’s Hormuz declaration puts Chevron at the center

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