Point of View: The Federal Reserve Has Over-Eased, with a 65% Chance of Stagflation in the United States

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSM.N) released its Q2 2026 financial results, posting revenue of NT$1.27 trillion, up from NT$933.792 billion in the year-ago period, and net profit of NT$706.6 billion. The earnings report indicated TSMC’s Q2 gross margin hit 67.7%, a 9.1 percentage point rise year-over-year. Its high-performance computing (HPC) business segment revenue grew 20% quarter-on-quarter, remaining a core growth driver. Additionally, the Taiwan Weighted Index closed at 45,624.98 points on July 16, down 6.61 points, or 0.01%.

According to data from Barchart, the Price to Sales Ratio of the S&P 500 has risen to its all-time high. This metric measures how much investors are willing to pay for each unit of a company’s revenue, and its current level reflects that the overall valuation of U.S. stocks is at a historic high.

According to PeckShield Alert monitoring, the Cascade CLS vault was hacked, leading to the theft of approximately $1.34 million in user USDC funds. The attacker has bridged the stolen assets from Arbitrum to Solana, then re-bridged them to Ethereum via RelayProtocol in the form of DAI.

Visa has released a joint research report with Artemis titled *Agentic Payments from the Ground Up*, which analyzes the development of AI agent payments and on-chain data. The report divides AI agent payments into two main categories: one is "large commercial payments" where agents complete tasks such as flight bookings and subscription management on behalf of users; the other is small-value machine-to-machine payments, including API calls and compute resource purchases, typically under $1. The machine payment protocol x402—incubated by Coinbase and Cloudflare and later managed by the Linux Foundation—has processed an adjusted trading volume of approximately $15 million and around 109.6 million cumulative transactions since its launch in May 2025, with primary activity concentrated on the Base, Solana, and Polygon networks. Another machine payment protocol, the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), built by Stripe and Tempo with contributions and support from Visa, has completed roughly $25,000 in settlements and processed about 115,000 transactions since its launch in March 2026. Visa noted that the growth of AI agent payments is driving demand for low-cost, high-frequency machine-native payment infrastructure, and stablecoins and blockchain networks are likely to become key components of micro-payment scenarios. The report concludes that future payment systems will not see a single replacement of bank cards or stablecoins, but rather a convergence of both across different use cases.

Asset management firm Fidelity International said it plans to rebuild its gold positions trimmed earlier this year, noting that gold’s long-term growth drivers remain strong. Fidelity’s multi-asset portfolio manager Ian Samson recently stated: “Our plan is to add to gold positions again; the only question is timing.” He added that he cut his gold allocation to a neutral level between January and February this year, a period when gold’s multi-year bull market abruptly ended. Samson forecasts the gold market will re-enter a bull market at some point in 2027. The logic behind a return to a bull market would only be undermined if “governments return to fiscal discipline and central banks are truly committed to bringing inflation back down,” he said, adding: “But I don’t think we are in that world right now.” Samson also noted that central banks’ continued gold purchases—a key driver of the previous gold bull market—will continue to underpin gold prices. (Source: Jin10)

According to OnchainLens monitoring, a trader who has suffered a total loss of $4.89 million has once again taken a heavy long position. Currently, the trader holds 84 BTC long positions worth approximately $5.43 million with 40x leverage. The account also holds long positions in HYPE valued at around $290,000 and long positions in PUMP worth roughly $148,000. Additionally, the trader has placed a limit buy order for 6.56 BTC, worth about $424,000, at a price of $64,600.