Nothing untoward going on here

DRUCK: “.. Given what’s going on in the economy and the capital spending boom and the war for capital, if anything, [bond yields seem] a little low. .. It’s just been like a slow, fundamentally driven march upward in yields. @financialtimes.com www.ft.com/content/7410...

[image or embed]— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) September 10, 2026 at 11:00 AM

Damn, Stan.

[image or embed]— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) September 10, 2026 at 11:08 AM

From the FT: [with emphasis and annotation added.]

Anthropic and OpenAI’s bankers are lobbying for an investment-grade credit rating after their upcoming initial public offerings, a designation that would lower the borrowing costs for their ambitious AI infrastructure plans. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have held talks with credit rating agencies in recent weeks on behalf of the two leading AI labs, as they look to gain access to the $11.7tn corporate bond market post-IPO, said people familiar with the matter. ...Achieving an investment-grade rating from Fitch, Moody’s and S&P soon after going public would be a remarkable feat for the two lossmaking AI labs, unlocking big benefits for the companies and their infrastructure partners including Oracle and Nvidia.The rating would open the door to pension funds, insurers and other institutional investors that take far more limited positions in riskier speculative-grade debt.It would provide another example of Wall Street changing longstanding practices to usher in the three largest IPOs in history. SpaceX, which went public in June, was the first large tech company to receive an immediate investment-grade rating. Elon Musk’s rocket conglomerate also benefited from changes to index rules that meant billions of dollars in passive investment tracking the Nasdaq immediately flowed into its stock.Previous tech heavyweights such as Meta, Netflix and Tesla waited a decade or more after their listings to get a top-tier credit rating.... A ratings bump could also help Oracle refinance some of its current debt pile after raising funds to fulfil a $300bn data centre build-out for OpenAI that has put it at risk of losing its investment-grade status following a recent downgrade.[Because it would be terrible if anything were to happen to the Ellison's massive fortune. -- MP] ...Anthropic is expected to unveil its IPO prospectus soon, allowing investors to pore over its finances ahead of a listing that could value the five-year-old company at $2tn or more. OpenAI is expected to follow suit with an IPO next year. [That 2027 date is key context for the Hugging Face incidents. The company had already been forced to push its IPO forward from 2026 and really needed a win which probably had something to do with the criminally negligent corner-cutting which led to the hacks -- MP]Analysts said opaque finances and the start-ups’ use of flattering annual recurring revenue figures have masked their actual performance. [And in the distance you can hear Ed Zitron laughing. -- MP]“Both companies have not provided concrete details,” one credit analyst said.