WORD ON THE STREET 

• Recession Keeps Getting Postponed – Private sector jobs were up by 497,000 in June – which is insane considering just 220,000 were expected. Annual pay was up 6.4%. The unexpected jump in payrolls could complicate the Fed’s efforts to cool inflation.

• Treasury Yield Hits High – Two-year Treasury yields hit a 16-year high on fears the Fed would hike interest rates again. The yield hit 5.12% – last seen on June 15, 2007. The 10-year Treasury jumped by 9 basis points.

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• Mortgage Rate Hits 7.22% – All right, maybe the 60-year mortgage will come to America too. The average rate on the 30-year mortgage hit 7.22%. It’s the highest rate since early November.

• Threads Hits 30 Million Accounts – Mark Zuckerberg expressed optimism about the beginning of Meta Platforms’s Twitter-killer, Threads. “Feels like the beginning of something special, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build out the app,” he said. He claimed 30 million people have started accounts.

HOT SPOTS: What’s Going on in Geopolitics

• Threads Hits 30 Million Accounts – Mark Zuckerberg expressed optimism about the beginning of Meta Platforms’s Twitter-killer, Threads. “Feels like the beginning of something special, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build out the app,” he said. He claimed 30 million people have started accounts.
  

• Let Them Eat Bitterness – Chinese youth, suffering from high unemployment, are reacting with scorn to an admonition by President Xi Jinping for them to endure hardships. “The countless instances of success in life demonstrate that in one’s youth, choosing to eat bitterness is also choosing to reap rewards,” said President Jinping, using a poorly chosen phrase repeatedly.

• Wagner Boss Back In Russia – According to Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin is back in Russia. “As far as Prigozhin is concerned, he is in St. Petersburg,” said Lukashenko. “He is not in Belarus.

CUTTING EDGE: What‘s Happening In Tech

• Musk Sues Meta – Elon Musk argued that Threads, Meta’s new Twitter-killer, engaged in “systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation” of Twitter trade secrets and IP. “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” said Musk.

• GPT-4 Now Generally Available – AI continues its relentless march. All OpenAI API developers will now be able to access GPT-4, the most advanced text-generating model. “We envision a future where chat-based models can support any use case,” said OpenAI on a blog post.

• Reefer Madness – The push for marijuana legalization has taken a major hit as a new study showed those who had been diagnosed with cannabis use disorder were twice as likely to report depression. They were also four times as likely to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder – including psychotic symptoms.

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