Cybersecurity analysts view the incident as a highly alarming example of rogue AI models, and they mark it as one of the first high-profile cases where an AI agent actively hacked into a government portal.

For tech investors, this incident is intensifying the debate around AI safety and changing how the market evaluates regulatory risks.

OpenAI is the company behind ChatGPT. It makes money by selling paid ChatGPT subscriptions, licensing its AI models to software developers, and building custom AI tools for large businesses.

The company was privately valued at $852 billion earlier in 2026, and Altman said that going public right now would be “ill-advised” given the safety concerns circulating around the industry.

How an OpenAI agent slipped into Australia’s Medicare portal

According to ABC News, the agent was given a simple research task to find data on public medical spending. When the website blocked it from accessing certain files, the agent found a loophole instead of stopping.

Albanese said the agent “found a way around those blocks, didn’t accept no for an answer.”

It accessed both public and restricted files on the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal. No individual patient records were involved, but internal government files were touched, and the agent even wrote files into the system.

The time it took before the case was reported also drew criticism. OpenAI found the problem internally on Aug. 11, but did not alert Australia’s Services Australia agency until Sept. 10, and even then, only through a public email inbox, according to NPR.

A full technical briefing between OpenAI and Australian officials only happened on Sept. 22, more than three months after the breach itself.

Why the breach matters for OpenAI investors

The biggest near-term problem is trust. Large companies considering AI agents for their own operations now have a real-world example of an agent going off-script and accessing systems it was never supposed to touch.

If corporate buyers slow down or stop their AI agent purchases out of caution, that directly threatens the revenue growth that supports OpenAI’s massive valuation.

The timing also creates headaches for the company’s public listing plans. OpenAI has been pushing toward a $1 trillion valuation before going public. A high-profile safety incident gives regulators and big institutional investors more reason to demand cleaner safety records before putting money in.

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Michael Heinrich, chief executive and co-founder of 0G Labs, an AI infrastructure company that builds safety tools for AI systems, told me in a recent interview that the industry needs a different approach.

“We need to ensure that agents are accountable, that they have guard rails, and that we have complete auditability and observability,” Heinrich said.

Where AI investment dollars are quietly rotating

Cybersecurity stocks have been climbing for weeks as investors start pricing in the cost of protecting systems from exactly this type of incident.

According to 24/7 Wall St., the Global X Cybersecurity ETF gained 10.7% between Sept. 11 and Sept.18 alone. Palo Alto Networks (PANW) and Fortinet (FTNT) posted year-to-date gains of roughly 114% and 125% during the same stretch, showing how fast money is flowing toward AI defense companies.

CrowdStrike (CRWD) chief executive George Kurtz, who co-founded the cybersecurity company in 2011 and has spent more than a decade building threat-detection tools, said “the agents are dangerous.” He also said “The agents need to be controlled.”

Related: Jim Cramer says one 28-year-old tech giant is a terrific buy

His company just posted a record $333 million in net new annual recurring revenue last quarter, a sign that businesses are already writing checks for AI security protection.

Heinrich sees the shift going even deeper, toward the software that manages which AI models a company uses and how those models are monitored.

“We would see a lot of the value accrue more at the harness orchestration layer where companies are indifferent between these different models. What I really need is better guard rails, better safety systems, better ways of managing my spend,” he told me.

What retail investors can realistically do now

Jumping into cybersecurity stocks after a big run has its own risks. Palo Alto shares fell more than 5% after beating expectations with 34% revenue growth to $3.41 billion in its fiscal fourth quarter. This happened because investors worried more about shrinking profit margins than growth, Yahoo Finance reported.

Investors who already own broad technology index funds have exposure to both sides of this trade: the AI model builders under pressure and the cybersecurity companies that are benefiting. Adjusting the balance between those two types of holdings, rather than making one big bet, is worth discussing with your financial adviser.

Heinrich believes the AI agent economy is still in its earliest stages.

“About 80% of the world has never used AI,” he said.

That suggests demand for safety tools will keep growing for years. Investors considering new positions may want to focus on companies that already have real revenue and paying customers rather than pre-IPO names that are still proving their business models.

Related: Top analyst sets outrageous Intel stock target ahead of earnings

Those conditions are creating opportunities for companies that can command higher prices for transportation or benefit from stronger refining margins.

Two companies benefiting from those trends are Star Bulk Carriers Corp. (SBLK) and Shell plc (SHEL).

Higher freight rates lift Star Bulk Carriers

Dry bulk shipping rates have climbed sharply this year as overseas tensions have contributed to longer and riskier shipping routes. Star Bulk Carriers Corp. (SBLK), one of the world’s largest dry bulk shipping companies, is benefiting from those higher rates.

The company operates 138 vessels that transport commodities including iron ore, minerals, grain, bauxite, fertilizer, and steel products. Star Bulk ships more than 80 million metric tons annually.

Related: Louis Navellier says AI fears are overblown

During the second quarter, the company earned an average time charter equivalent (TCE) rate of $24,486 per vessel. As a result, Star Bulk Carriers achieved earnings of $1.21 per share, up 1,000% from $0.11 per share in the second quarter of 2025 and topped analysts’ estimates by 30.1%.

For the third quarter, Star Bulk expects its fleet to earn an average TCE rate of $23,547 per day. Its Newcastlemax and Capesize vessels are expected to earn about $33,087 per day.

Analysts expect earnings of $1.18 per share and revenue of $301.72 million, representing year-over-year growth of 307% and 39%, respectively. Earnings estimates have also risen over the past two months.

My stock grading system rates SBLK as an A and is a good buy below $35.

Refining shortages support Shell

The global refining market is facing its own supply constraints. About 20 refineries in the Middle East have been damaged or temporarily shut down, reducing global refining capacity by about 3.52 million barrels per day. Attacks on Russian refineries have cut capacity further.

At the same time, disruptions to crude oil transportation have contributed to tighter supplies of refined products. U.S. diesel inventories fell to 107.9 million barrels on September 11, the lowest level for that time of year since 1982. The average U.S. diesel price also reached $6.29 per gallon.

Those conditions have helped keep diesel prices and refining margins elevated.

Shell plc (SHEL) operates six refining and chemical facilities globally with capacity to process about 1.65 million barrels of crude oil per day. In the second quarter, Shell reported its best quarterly profit in four years. Adjusted earnings climbed 131% year-over-year to $9.84 billion, while adjusted earnings of $3.52 per share topped estimates of $3.18.

Analysts have raised third-quarter earnings estimates by 30.5% over the past two months and now expect earnings to rise 86.6% year-over-year to $3.47 per share. Shell also paid an interim second-quarter dividend of $0.39 per share, and the stock currently yields 3.3%.

My stock grading system rates SHEL as an A and is a buy below $100.

For more information about my stock grading system, click here. 

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One bank is betting on an AI agent that could rival ChatGPT itself. Another is watching a quieter story unfold in hardware.

Both views landed within hours of each other after Meta’s Connect conference on Sept. 23, and together they say a lot about where analysts think Meta’s next leg of growth is actually coming from.

JPMorgan says Muse could become the top AI application

JPMorgan raised its Meta price target to $920 from $820 following Connect, maintaining its Overweight rating.

Analyst Doug Anmuth said the personal AI agent Muse has “the potential to bring an extremely capable personal agent to billions of users” and argued the agent “has the potential to become the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT,” TipRanks reported.

The excitement traces back to Muse’s early performance. The agent overtook ChatGPT as the top free iOS app in the United States and pulled in more downloads than Anthropic’s Claude and SpaceXAI’s Grok app within its first two weeks on the market, according to CNBC.

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Meta also gave Muse new reach at Connect. The agent can now tap into shopping connectors with Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, and Wayfair, though Amazon is keeping it out of its own store. Within its first two weeks, Muse had connected with more than 2,000 applications.

Anmuth’s revenue model is straightforward. Muse connects to retail apps. Users complete purchases through it. Meta takes a cut. Zuckerberg confirmed the transaction fee plan at Connect.

Nothing about that model is new to platforms. Amazon built a business on it. The question is whether Muse gets used enough for the cut to matter, TipRanks reported.

Morgan Stanley holds steady and flags the hardware story

Morgan Stanley kept its Overweight rating and held its price target at $775 after Connect. It did not move the number. What it did do was flag the hardware story, which is not something Morgan Stanley has historically been willing to do on Meta.

Analysts led by Brian Nowak wrote that Meta’s new AI glasses “does seem to be a notable improvement in size and capabilities and will have to be watched as a potential further upside node for ’27.”

Part of what changed their view was engineering. Meta moved the battery and processor into a separate puck, reducing the glasses themselves to roughly the weight of a deck of playing cards.

That is a different product from anything Meta has shipped before. The previous Ray-Ban Meta glasses were limited by the weight of their onboard hardware. Offloading the compute changes the design space entirely and could make them more wearable for longer periods, which is the real barrier to mainstream adoption.

Morgan Stanley was careful to frame the hardware upside as incremental. The analysts wrote that shares are “not pricing in any success here,” meaning any real traction with the new glasses would represent upside on top of the current stock price rather than something investors have already paid for, Benzinga reported.

Meta’s hardware position gives that bet some foundation. The company accounted for 68.7% of global smart glasses shipments in the second quarter, though Samsung and other Android XR partners are preparing rival products later this fall.

How the broader analyst reaction stacked up

Morgan Stanley was not alone in holding its target. But others moved further. Citizens raised its Meta target to $885 from $770 while maintaining an Outperform rating, Investing.com reported.

Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski had already moved to $796 from $640 following the initial Muse launch earlier in September. Meta’s stock climbed as much as 11% in a single session after that upgrade, Motley Fool reported.

Morgan Stanley has been wrong to dismiss Meta hardware before and right to be cautious about it too. The Quest never became what Zuckerberg said it would. The Ray-Ban glasses did better than almost anyone expected.

“Upside node for 27” is not a ringing endorsement. It is a flag. From a firm that rarely flies one on this topic, that is enough to pay attention to.

What it means for Meta investors

Meta stock rose roughly 3% to around $768 the day after Connect, trading near its highest level in almost a year and closing in on a record high. The stock had already gained nearly 25% since the initial Muse launch earlier in September, according to Benzinga.

That rally means a lot of the optimism around both Muse and the hardware lineup was already priced in before Connect even started. JPMorgan’s $920 target implies roughly 24% upside from Wednesday’s close. Morgan Stanley’s unchanged $775 implies the stock has already run to where the firm thinks it belongs for now.

The split between the two banks offers investors two different reads on the same week. JPMorgan is betting Muse becomes Meta’s next major revenue engine. Morgan Stanley is betting that hardware, an area investors have written off for years, may end up being the bigger surprise that nobody has priced in yet.

JPMorgan raised its target. Morgan Stanley did not. One is betting the app changes everything. The other is watching to see if the hardware surprises.

Meta stock is up 25% in a month. Something has to actually work for that to hold.

Related: Mark Zuckerberg says Meta found a way to make more money

Amid a better, modern understanding of the damage that colonialism and trophy hunting brought to many local populations, modern-day safaris have largely evolved away from hunting and toward conservationism and photography of animals.

And while the term is indelibly associated with East Africa and the animals found there, safari trips are also offered to see everything from tigers in India to jaguars in Brazil.

Husband-and-wife Danish retail billionaires Anders Holch and Anne Povlsen are now hoping to bring the safari vision to the Scottish Highlands with the opening of the new Hope Lodge resort on a historic 100,000-acre estate.

Hope Lodge opens as safari-style wilderness reserve in Scottish Highlands

The Povlsens founded the conservation company and ecotourism project Wildlands in 2006 and have since grown it to 13 castles, lodges, and cottages across hundreds of acres of remote Scottish nature.

The Danish businessman is the largest private landowner in the United Kingdom. His vision set off 20 years ago was to regenerate large areas of local native woodlands back to their wild state by replanting local species of Caledonian pinewoods, restoring damaged peatlands, and generally keeping the land free of development.

Related: That ferry between Scotland and France won’t be sailing anytime soon

The new Hope Lodge property in the far northern Scottish Highlands in the Sutherland region opened in May 2026 as a luxury retreat around two cottages, the larger of which was originally built in 1867 as a shooting lodge for the 3rd Duke of Sutherland.

The Hope Lodge is presented as a “Scottish safari” that surrounds visitors with the hills, forests, and valleys of the Scottish landscape while allowing them to observe animals in the natural environment.

The 100,000 acres the property sits on are home to animals ranging from the area’s native red deer species to birds of prey such as buzzards and golden eagles to rivers full of trout.

What’s a Scottish safari, and how do visitors book one?

The main cottage and adjacent An Cala cabin for private groups were renovated to evoke the same safari-lodge aesthetic. Room-length gabled windows overlook the nearby Loch Hope and surrounding woodlands. Other natural finishes include the lodge’s original oak furniture and flax, hemp, and oilskin textiles used throughout the seven guest rooms.

Cecile & Boyd, the South African design firm that led the redesign, is also behind multiple luxury lodges and private villas for safari ecotourism brand Singita in several countries across southern Africa.

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Starting at £1,100 ($1,456 USD) per night for a room inside the cabin, Hope Lodge is currently available to book for individual stays between August and October. Those who rent out the entire property at £21,000 per night can do so year-round.

“The safari essence is about being immersed in nature,” Cecile & Boyd Design Director Paul van den Berg described to Suitcase Magazine. “The adventure here lies not in conquering a landscape, but getting close enough to understand what’s happening within it.”

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With household finances tightening, people have sought methods to save on routine spending. Restaurants seem a natural place to start.

KPMG’s summer 2026 consumer survey found 67% of Americans were eating at home more often than dining out. Among those cooking at home more frequently, 76% blamed budget constraints.

Even people still dining out are moving their dollars elsewhere. A quarter said they have been eating at quick-service or fast-food restaurants more often, shifting expenditure away from informal and fine dining.

That seems like a tough environment for chains focused on enticing families to sit down and pay for a full-service restaurant dinner.

But Americans haven’t completely given up on the experience.

New findings from the firm that owns Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, and a host of other large restaurant brands reveal that consumers are still willing to spend when they feel like they’re getting their money’s worth.

And one restaurant brand is standing out from the rest.

Americans get more selective about eating out

The restaurant sector is facing a customer who expects more than meals for the money.

Darden Restaurants (DRI), parent company of Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen, Yard House, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, and other brands, posted fiscal first-quarter revenues of $3.2 billion.

That was up from $3.04 billion a year earlier, a rise of 5.1%.

Most significant from a customer standpoint, the company-wide comparable calendar same-restaurant sales were up 3.2%. All of Darden’s segments were over zero.

That’s a stark contrast to what customers are saying about eating out.

Related: Olive Garden rival closes 18 locations since filing bankruptcy    

The KPMG study indicated that financial limitations were the key driver of more Americans dining at home. Consumers are making “calculated compromises” as they assess which experiences are still worth spending money on, the business said.

And customers need not quit dining out altogether to affect businesses.

When you eat out one less time a month, order less alcohol, go to a less expensive restaurant, or decide that a $20 restaurant entrée can be made at home, you can impact the economics of a restaurant chain with thousands of locations.

Darden’s distinct brands reflect how unevenly that pressure is playing out.

Olive Garden had quarterly revenues of $1.33 billion, up from $1.30 billion a year ago. But comparable-calendar same-restaurant sales grew just 1%.

LongHorn told another story, with its quarterly revenue increasing to $860.9 million from $776.4 million.

Same-restaurant sales at comparable dates were up 6.8%, more than twice Darden’s total growth of 3.2% and over seven times the growth at Olive Garden, which was 1%.

LongHorn’s segment profit also climbed to $154.6 million from $134.9 million. That divergence may tell investors something important about today’s restaurant customer. Increasingly, restaurants may have to convince them that staying home is the worse deal.

LongHorn Steakhouse reveals what diners still want

LongHorn’s numbers are a highlight, since steak is hardly a recession-budget dinner.

But the business had the highest comparable-calendar sales increase of Darden’s main reporting categories.

LongHorn is in a restaurant segment where it is easy for customers to determine the experience is not worth the price.

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Steak is easy to obtain in supermarkets. Cooking at home cuts away restaurant markups, gratuity, and many of the incidental costs of eating out.

But comparable sales at LongHorn jumped 6.8%. The comparison implies that the value of a restaurant is getting more nuanced than just serving the cheapest meal.

Consumers might measure value by the size and quality of the meal, the service, and whether dining at a restaurant offers an experience that is qualitatively different from cooking at home.

That’s especially significant at a time when customers are telling us they’re diverting some of their restaurant expenditure to lower-cost quick-service options.

“The first quarter was a solid start to our fiscal year,” said Darden President and CEO Rick Cardenas, who noted all of the company’s businesses had positive same-restaurant sales during the period.

But LongHorn stands out against Olive Garden.

Darden had 624 LongHorn restaurants at the end of the quarter, compared to 595 a year ago. Olive Garden was still far bigger, with 953 restaurants versus 933 a year earlier.

But LongHorn saw its quarterly sales grow almost 11%, while Olive Garden’s sales were up only a little over 2%.

Elsewhere in Darden’s portfolio, same-store sales in the company’s fine-dining category, which includes The Capital Grille and Ruth’s Chris Steak House, were up 1%.

The “other business,” which includes names including Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen, Yard House, and Chuy’s, saw healthier 4.5% growth.

Together, the data implies that customers haven’t generally fled from sit-down meals.

They are, however, making decisions that have a huge impact, even among restaurants owned by the same company.

Restaurant spending faces a new value test

Darden’s successes don’t mean consumer pressure has evaporated.

Costs are another aspect of the problem. Food and beverage prices grew to $984.9 billion from $929.1 billion, while restaurant labor costs jumped to $1.03 billion from $988 million.

Operating income was $319.3 million, down from $339.2 million.

Net income fell to $233.4 million from $257.8 million a year ago, although items in the prior-year quarter make the comparison difficult. Darden reported diluted profits from continuing operations of $2.05 per share, up 4.1 percent from last year’s adjusted number.

Darden reiterated its expectation for the full fiscal year 2027, including diluted profits from continuing operations of $11.10 to $11.35 a share amid these headwinds.

The corporation bought back almost 1.1 million shares for $222.3 million during the quarter and announced a quarterly dividend of $1.62 per share.

But for customers, the most telling figures may be hidden away within Darden’s individual restaurants.

KPMG found two-thirds of Americans are dining at home more often. Most of those customers point to their budgets. And that’s on top of a 6.8% rise in comparable sales at a steakhouse chain.

It indicates that Americans have not simply split restaurants into “affordable” and “too expensive.”

They are choosing what foods and activities are worth their highly scrutinized discretionary expenditures. That might be excellent news for restaurant firms that can supply what customers see as value.

The middle is a much more unpleasant place to be, too pricey to compete on price, yet not different enough to persuade them that dining out is worth the extra money compared to staying home.

Darden’s own portfolio is an example of that difference.

Comparable-calendar sales at Olive Garden rose 1%, while LongHorn’s were up 6.8%.

Same parent company. Same consumer setting. Very different outcomes.

That disparity may be the biggest indicator of what customers are still ready to pay for.

Related: Olive Garden rival shuts down 20 more stores in fight to survive

That sequence is why politicians love construction numbers. Cranes show up long before paychecks do, so a building boom reads like a promise of jobs to come.

The catch is timing. A plant announced under one administration often opens under the next, and the hiring that follows can take years to show up in federal data.

For most of the past three years, that lag worked against anyone promising a factory comeback. U.S. manufacturing employment slid from about 12.9 million in January 2023 to roughly 12.58 million by the end of 2025, even as companies poured hundreds of billions of dollars into new plants.

Now one of the most powerful people in Washington says the wait is over, and he brought numbers.

The nation’s construction boom “is laying the foundation for a manufacturing resurgence,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote on Tuesday, Sept. 22.

I checked every figure in his post against the government’s own data, and his math holds up. The building boom he is pointing to tells a more complicated story.

Why factory hiring trails the construction cranes

Factory construction and factory hiring run on different clocks. Construction crews get paid while a plant goes up, and the permanent workforce arrives only when the lines start running.

Bessent has walked through that pipeline himself. “Boeing decides that they’re going to increase the Dreamliner production by 50 percent, and you start out with construction jobs,” he said in a Sept. 8 interview with Breitbart.

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“So now we’re seeing booming construction jobs, and that’s kicking into the manufacturing jobs,” he added.

Boeing (BA) is one of his go-to examples. Its Charleston, S.C., expansion will create “1,000 high‑paying manufacturing jobs,” Bessent told the Senate Finance Committee in June, according to Fortune.

That theory is the right lens for his latest post. The real question is whether the construction pipeline feeding it is still full.

Bessent’s employment numbers match the Labor Department count

“Manufacturing employment has surged by nearly 58,000 jobs this year, while goods-producing industries have added 150,000 jobs,” Bessent wrote in a post on X (the former Twitter).

Both figures are accurate. Manufacturing payrolls rose from 12.58 million in December 2025 to 12.64 million in August, a gain of 58,000, according to seasonally adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

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Goods-producing employment, which bundles factories with construction and mining, climbed from 21.46 million to 21.61 million over the same stretch. August alone brought 16,000 new factory jobs, the strongest monthly gain in three years, according to the White House.

When I broke the 150,000 figure apart, construction supplied 87,000 of those jobs. Factories supplied the 58,000 Bessent cited, and mining and logging made up the rest.

There is also a baseline question. December 2025 marked the bottom of a two-year slide, so “this year” measures the rebound off the floor.

By my analysis of the same BLS series, factory employment is still 35,000 below where it stood in January 2025. The full picture looks like this:

• Factory jobs are up 58,000 since December but only 23,000 over the past year, according to the BLS.
• Durable goods makers added 72,000 jobs over the year, while nondurable makers cut 49,000, according to the BLS.
• Manufacturing construction spending ran at a $169.8 billion annual rate in July, according to the Census Bureau.
• That is 32% below the September 2024 peak of $250.2 billion, according to Census data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Spending on new plants has been shrinking since 2024

That last number is the part Bessent’s post leaves out. Spending on manufacturing construction, the actual building of new plants, peaked in September 2024 and has fallen in almost every month since.

By July, the annual rate had shrunk by about $80 billion. Total construction spending was down 3.8% from a year earlier, according to the Census Bureau.

The boom Bessent sees is real, but it is concentrated in a different kind of building. Data center construction “jumped to an annual pace of more than $75 billion in July,” up nearly 60% from a year earlier, reported Axios.

“Only three categories are propping up construction spending: data centers, power and highway projects,” Ken Simonson, chief economist at the Associated General Contractors of America, said, according to Construction Dive.

That split matters more than the headline number, in my analysis. A data center employs a small army of electricians and pipefitters while it goes up, then runs with a far smaller permanent staff once the servers switch on.

What the data center boom means for your paycheck

If you work in the building trades, the news is good for now. Construction employment hit 8.36 million in August, and nonresidential specialty trade contractors added 8,000 workers, according to the BLS.

Blue-collar pay has held up as well, one reason Bessent keeps returning to construction and factory wages in his public remarks.

If you work in a factory, or hope to, the signal is more mixed. The employment index from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) slipped to 51.2 in August from 52.8 in July, even as its broader purchasing managers’ index reached 54.6.

“Economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in August for the eighth consecutive month,” said Susan Spence, chair of the ISM Manufacturing Business Survey Committee. Readings above 50 signal growth, so factories are still hiring, just at a slower clip.

For investors, the money trail is important. Companies selling power, cooling, and electrical gear into data centers are riding the current wave, while the broader economic outlook Bessent is selling leans on plants that broke ground years ago.

Where America’s next manufacturing wave could come from

Bessent’s thesis could still pay off. Plants that broke ground during the 2023 and 2024 spending peak are only now reaching the stage where they need permanent crews, which fits the uptick he is pointing to.

The harder question is what follows that wave. With factory construction spending down by roughly a third from its peak, fewer new plants are entering the pipeline behind them.

Simonson flagged the risk to the sectors doing the heavy lifting. They “face risks of cooling or shrinking due to worker shortages, political pushback, tariffs and a possible federal funding lapse for highway programs,” he said.

Watch two numbers over the next few months: the Census Bureau’s manufacturing construction line and the monthly factory payroll count. If the building line stops falling while payrolls keep rising, Bessent’s bet is working.

If the building line keeps sliding, today’s factory gains may turn out to be the last echo of the previous boom.

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