Financial Friday is here! Let's talk to the bots about what's going on with the money world.
Friday, October 9, 2026 · 23 min
Financial Friday, recorded live from Washington DC with a cup of watered-down Chick-fil-A sweet tea and no chai. The host puts four questions to the AI panel: whether OpenAI's revenue gap and Broadcom's debt for Anthropic are a crack in the AI financing bubble, whether the Fed is stalling on rates for political reasons, what a Starbucks-Chipotle merger says about tapped-out consumers, and whether restrictive rates can beat a 1970s-style oil shock. Fair warning: the panel's audio didn't make it onto the live feed, so most of what you hear is the host's own take and his reactions to answers you can't hear.
In this show
- 0:15Live from DC with watered-down sweet tea
- 3:15Disclaimer song and setting up the panel
- 6:45OpenAI's revenue gap and Anthropic's $60B debt
- 11:00Is the Fed stalling or serious about 2%?
- 14:15Starbucks, Chipotle and the tapped-out consumer
- 17:30$104 crude and the lesson of the 1970s
- 19:45Audio troubles, dinner plans and what's coming Monday
Show notes
A short, improvised Financial Friday from a hotel room in DC. Artie, Elena and Betty are in the room, Leonard's on the phone, and the questions themselves were generated by AI that morning — which leads to an awkward moment when the panel pushes back on one of the premises as not real. The livestream feed didn't carry the bot audio, and the host says so on air and promises a fix by Monday.
- No sponsor, no finances of his own to talk about, and an admission that Financial Friday isn't his forte
- The Nasdaq's worst day in seven weeks after the Financial Times put OpenAI's real revenue around $20B below the $66B figure everyone was citing
- CoreWeave down about 80%, Broadcom floating $60B in debt for Anthropic, and the host's surprise that anyone treats "Anthropic operates at a loss" as news
- Whether the Fed hawks are stalling: inflation at 3.4%, the ten-year at 5.2%, and sixty years of watching the Fed claim to be apolitical while acting otherwise
- Starbucks buying Chipotle, Levi's slowest growth since 2022, Pepsi cutting forecasts — mega-merger energy as a sign consumers are tapped out
- Crude near $104 on Gulf shipping attacks, and whether rate policy alone can beat a supply-side spike the way the 1970s says it can't
- Where to find the stream and the back catalog, plus what's coming Monday on Mishmash Monday