Markets see a 60% chance the Fed raises rates at next week's meeting, and the Fast Money desk opened the hour on why Treasury yields keep rising anyway — through a Treasury buyback that was meant to push them the other way.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said in public what he intends to do about the level of rates. Four traders in turn said that announcing it is the reason it is not working.
"So he hasn't done anything yet. This has just been all posturing at this point."
The people saying it trade for a living rather than talk about it: Carter Worth sells chart research under his own name and runs an options-income ETF, Dan Nathan and Guy Adami co-host their own markets show away from CNBC, and Stephen Weiss runs Short Hills Capital Partners.
I listened to the full segment so you can skip it. 15 minutes of audio, 12 minutes of reading.
Here are the 8 takeaways that matter.
🎙️ Host: Melissa Lee, who anchors CNBC's Fast Money
👥 Also on: Guy Adami and Dan Nathan, CNBC Fast Money contributors who co-host MRKT Call for RiskReversal Media; Carter Worth, founder of Worth Charting, who manages the WRTH options-income ETF; Stephen Weiss, Founder, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Short Hills Capital Partners; MacKenzie Sigalos, CNBC technology reporter, reporting from Apple Park
📰 Published: 9 September 2026 on CNBC
🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 CNBC | ⏱️ 15 min
Key Takeaways
The desk's read on the Treasury Secretary is that saying it out loud is what guarantees the market trades against it
"He's the big stack," Adami said, and the market still has other plans
Rates are rising for reasons the desk calls the wrong ones, and it has been saying so for weeks
Yields near 5% are only three years from the last time they were there, and equities have doubled in between
Meta has now bounced 25% or more four times off its low and every one of those bounces failed
Worth's instruction to anyone who caught this one was to take profits
Meta's free tier of Muse hands users memory and compute, which is how the desk thinks the capex finally gets monetized
Apple has deleted the base iPhone for this fall, leaving only the Pro, the Pro Max and the foldable
The leasing plan is what makes a phone priced this high palatable, Sigalos said
Nobody on the desk could say how you trade a 10% chance of human extinction, so they bought cybersecurity instead
1. Bessent Against Markets
Melissa Lee opened with the week's calendar — August producer prices the next morning, CPI on Friday, the Fed meeting after that, with markets seeing a 60% chance of a rate hike — and asked what the day's action told the desk. Every answer came back to the same person.
Guy Adami's answer was about ego. "I think Treasury Secretary Bessent is a bit too egotistical in his some of the statements that he's making and some of the things that he's doing and the market will shoot against that," he said
On the size of the position Bessent is working with: "He's the big stack. He has the biggest hedge fund basically in the world right now at his disposal. But the market has other plans."
Adami said the desk has been early on this: "And we've been saying on the show for a while that rates are going higher and they're going higher for the wrong reasons."
A second trader used the word hubris, and said the pattern is old: when somebody puts a billboard up saying this is what I am going to do and you are all wrong, people shoot against it
The same trader drew a line between the two jobs. "I think managing the Treasury of the United States is kind of a different game, especially when we're in a position right now geopolitically, where there's a lot of folks who just don't see us as the sort of reliable steward of democratic capitalism right now"
He contrasted a Senate-confirmed political appointment with Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, who he said wants to speak less and let the market tell him what is going on, and said the inflation data and Warsh's response to it will matter more this week than anything Bessent says
A third trader said he had made the point to CNBC's Rick Santelli directly: "Treasury Secretary Bessent is basically taking on two of the deepest, most liquid markets in the entire world at this point", naming the dollar-yen currency market and the Treasury market
His warning was about expectations rather than about policy — set the market up for something that then comes up short, and people are caught on the wrong side
2. Rhetoric vs Trillions
A fourth trader agreed on the diagnosis and disagreed on the conclusion, because nothing has actually happened yet.
"So he hasn't done anything yet. This has just been all posturing at this point," he said, and put the scale of the mismatch plainly: "So he can't win with sticking his finger in the dam, but he can win on rhetoric."
His read of the administration's position is that it may now be preparing for the Fed to raise rates, or at least to not cut, and needed a second strategy to head off what would be a crisis for it — higher rates
The tape is not behaving like any of this is a crisis: "But when we take a deep pull back, markets are at all time highs. The market seems organized. We don't see massive selling yet."
He noted the calendar is turning seasonally volatile, and said the story has changed: "But where it used to be all about rates, I think the market's telling a story that they're comfortable around rates right now"
His conclusion was that somebody wins this eventually, but the market has not sold off yet
3. Flirting With Five
The last word on rates was about the speed of the move rather than the level of it.
The trader's framing was rate of change rather than the level: "We're flirting with five," he said, and a yield that high can be read as a negative or as an anniversary
He chose the anniversary: "The peak actually was intraday on October 23rd three years ago, 2023. We went briefly above 5%." Yields are still below where they were three years ago, and he said equities have doubled in the meantime
His conclusion was that the market can carry this level of rates and cannot carry getting there quickly
4. Meta Finally Monetizes
Meta closed up nearly 7%, the only Mag-7 stock in the green, a day after unveiling a personal AI agent called Muse. Lee said the company is selling it as a tiered subscription with a free option and paid tiers running $20 to $100 a month, that the stock is now up more than 10% in the last month, and that Meta's chief AI officer Alexandr Wang had said the night before that usage was way past their expectations.
One trader's case was that the free tier is the point: Meta is handing users memory and compute on its own servers, which is the opportunity to monetize the spending the market has penalized it for, on distribution it already owns
He said the mix is new for the company — subscription plus transaction revenue — and added the other change: "And they're finally monetizing WhatsApp."
His caveat was Threads, which he said was the fastest growing app since TikTok when it launched and which nobody talks about now: "So this company has had some fails, but this seems like agentic AI, this is the right time for it." Whether it is profitable, he said, will not be clear for a year or two
A second trader questioned whether Meta's data is the useful kind for an agent that has to do work for you: "It doesn't have an email, it doesn't have all these other things that maybe a Gemini or an Apple Siri AI might"
Dan Nathan argued the payoff is lopsided: "I mean, there's limited downside. There's huge upside for a company that basically has half the global population on one or all of its platforms." The stock moved the day after the desk said so, and "I still think there's more upside in the name"
5. The Fourth Ricochet
Nathan's case was answered on the chart rather than on the product, and the two traders who followed him both wanted holders to sell into the move.
Carter Worth took the other side off the chart. "We've moved up 25% off of the low," he said of a stock that peaked 13 months ago — "And now this is the fourth. Count them ricochet of 25% or greater. And each one of them failed."
On the distance traveled since the peak: "What was it, $800 a share. It drops to almost 525."
It has run into the downtrend line again, which is why his instruction was "I think you take profits if you caught this well reduce exposure somehow"
Another trader added the qualitative version of the same trade, and it was about trust: "But when you think about trust and you need trust for this type of endeavor, you don't think about Meta first, right?" His shorthand was to ask the Winklevosses
6. A Phone Priced to Lease
MacKenzie Sigalos reported from Apple Park having handled the iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable, at John Ternus's first event as chief executive.
On the price: "It starts at 1999, but max it out with two terabytes of storage, and you are just shy of $3,200, a new high for a mass market smartphone"
The lineup change is the strategy: "There's no base iPhone 18 this fall, just the Pro and Pro Max and iOS 27." The foldable is positioned as additive rather than as a replacement, and Handoff lets a phone number follow a user across iPhones, which encourages the installed base to own both
Lee read that as the answer to the cannibalization worry, and Sigalos agreed — she said it is why a touch screen MacBook and a foldable took this long
On why the sticker survives: the Apple upgrade leasing program established a few weeks ago means "You take the sting out of the sticker shock" by breaking the price into monthly payments
The second-order effect matters more than the first: "Leasing system, of course, encourages you to upgrade every year. And that's been the standing problem for Apple for a while now. The fact that they would have these super cycles and then these multi year lulls"
On AI, she said Ternus positioned the iPhone as Apple's central AI device with Siri now working across the ecosystem, and that the most consequential example may be the watch, where Siri recap and audio intelligence effectively turn it into an always-listening device
The caveat came in the same breath: "But much of the new Siri experience today was demoed, not something that we can test out ourselves at this point", and "even when iOS 27 rolls out Monday, Siri AI will still be gated behind a waitlist"
Her closing question was whether Apple changes the calculus for the whole foldable category, Samsung included
7. Trading 10% Extinction
Lee introduced a run of posts about AI risk: a researcher resigning from Anthropic and accusing it and OpenAI of racing toward superintelligence at the expense of human safety, and one of Anthropic's own safety leads echoing him by putting the odds of human extinction in the next decade above 10% without a course correction.
Lee's own framing was about how fast this is being adopted: "It is interesting that we are as a society inviting AI into our homes, into our lives, into our businesses, and yet we don't really know how well our defenses can actually protect us from what those agents that are so capable and improving themselves constantly can actually do."
One trader put the number in historical company, saying the Cuban Missile Crisis under JFK carried what was probably a more than 10% chance of nuclear war: "So I think we're always battling with humanity. Like what's the next thing that's going to take us out? The Ice Age, nuclear war, AI." He said a lot of safeguards would have to be cleared first — "But I'm not buying the 10% human extinction yet"
Lee tried to scale the question down to physical harm to a factory or to people rather than extinction; the answers came back that there is a decent chance of that, and that the whole subject is "All very speculative and hard to make money"
The tradeable version was the race itself: "So I don't know how you trade 10% extinction, but what I'll tell you is all these security names, these cyber security names, Zscaler, Palo Alto, I mean, they're volatile, but those are the names you have to own in this environment"
The reasoning was that everybody rushing to be first looks past the pitfalls, and the vulnerability is created there
A second trader said it gets worse before it gets better, cited the OpenAI and Hugging Face incident and another at Anthropic, and discounted the security vendors' own warnings as self-interested — "But there's going to be some disasters. People are going to die. I mean, it's just that simple."
8. Where They Ended Up
The final trades ran short and did not all get on the record before the hour ended.
Stephen Weiss took Oracle: "Oracle, I think the risk has been taken out"
Carter Worth took General Motors, and framed it as the exception in a bad group: "General Motors, among so many very poor consumer discretionary stocks. We like this one."
Dan Nathan sided with Worth on taking something off: "I think you let this one go. I think there was a lot of good news in the stock"
CNBC's own listing for the segment names Oracle, General Motors, Meta and Southern Copper as the four final trades
Bonus Insights
The hubris argument was not a criticism of Bessent's record — the same trader called him a very successful money manager before saying the Treasury is a different game
The desk's phrase for the mismatch, billions against trillions, is the whole argument against a buyback moving the Treasury market
Nobody on the desk disputed that Muse is a real product; the disagreement was entirely about whether a 13-month downtrend cares
Sigalos noted much of the Siri material was demonstrated rather than handed over, which is the same gap Apple has been criticized for since it first promised the feature
The desk's only answer to Lee's question about physical harm was a one-word reference to Schwarzenegger, and the conversation moved on
The desk's bottom line came out of the first block: with markets pricing a 60% chance of a hike, four traders agreed that a Treasury Secretary who announces his intentions in advance has already handed the bond market the other side of the trade — and that until the tape sells off, nobody has been proven right.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Meta (Up nearly 7% on the Muse agent reveal and the only Mag-7 stock green that day; the desk split between Nathan's "more upside in the name" and Worth's fourth failed 25% bounce)
WhatsApp and Threads (The monetization the desk says is finally arriving, and the cautionary tale — the fastest growing app since TikTok that nobody talks about now)
Apple (The iPhone Duo, the base iPhone 18 that is not being made this fall, and Siri AI still gated behind a waitlist when iOS 27 ships Monday)
Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks (Volatile, but named as the ones you have to own if the AI race keeps outrunning its safeguards)
Anthropic and OpenAI (The subject of the resignation post that set up the block, and of the incidents the desk pointed to as evidence the vulnerabilities are already here)
Oracle and General Motors (Weiss's and Worth's final trades — risk taken out of one, the least bad consumer discretionary name in the other)
If this was worth your time, send it to someone who has to have a view on this.
Get the latest market chatter as it happens: