“You hear that, Wall Street? That’s the sound of cheap money ridin’ into town.” -Sheriff Jerome Powell

After five straight days of red candles, AI doomsday analysts pumping out their 12th “the bubble’s about to burst” report of the week, and Walmart and Target posting sad little earnings that showed Trump’s tariffs are still stomping retail in the face… things were looking about as promising as Truth Social’s balance sheet. Then came Cowboy Jerome.

The man strolled into Jackson Hole, Wyoming like John Wayne in a dust storm. Hat low. Boots clicking. Everyone bracing for the worst. And then, like some cowboy angel sent down to save the markets, he tipped his hat and whispered the words traders have been having wet dreams about for months: “Howdy, partners… yeah, we’re cutting rates.”

Obviously, he didn’t say it outright (the Fed loves their cryptic crossword-speak) but the translation was clear. The stimmies are back, baby. And Wall Street reacted exactly like my wife in a Target clearance aisle: buying everything in sight. The S&P ripped 1.6%. The Nasdaq exploded 2%. And the Dow Jones (yes, the same dusty boomer index everyone left for dead) leapfrogged 918 points and notched a new all-time high. Stop pinching yourself. This is real.

Naturally, the mega-caps did their little victory dance too. Nvidia shook off the DeepSeek-China jitters and ended up 1.3% (phew that was close). Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon each climbed more than 2%. And Tesla ripped nearly 5% all thanks to Jerome’s word salad. But the real headline belonged to Intel.

Rumors swirled all week, and then Daddy Trump confirmed it: the U.S. government is going full Warren Buffett and buying 10% of Intel for about $100 billion. Trump called it a “great deal,” while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made it clear the government isn’t handing out CHIPS Act cash for free… it wants equity. In other words, the U.S. just turned Intel into a state-sponsored side hustle. So now Intel has Softbank and the POTUS in its corner, all within a week… talk about the comeback of the year.

But not everyone managed to stay on the Powell stampede. ETHzilla (Peter Thiel’s little Frankenstein that morphed from pharma into a crypto-treasury play) got bucked straight off the bull, tumbling more than 30% after unloading 74.8 million shares. This came just days after it was the golden boy of the “ETH on balance sheet” trade. Now it’s flat for August and nursing the kind of hangover only crypto bros can truly appreciate.

Apple and Google popped after Bloomberg said Apple might use Google’s Gemini AI to reboot Siri. Which means: after a decade of Siri being dumber than a Magic 8-Ball, Apple’s ready to hand the keys to the same company that built Google Glass and Stadia. For Apple, it’s an admission they’re miles behind in AI. For Google, it’s a Trojan Horse to sneak Gemini onto hundreds of millions of iPhones overnight.

All in all, Powell’s “maybe we cut rates in September” line was enough to send rate-cut odds to 91%, push Treasury yields lower, and pump crypto higher. Stocks went bananas, doomsday AI bubble chatter got shoved aside, and traders who’d spent the week panic-selling suddenly had to buy back everything in sight. For now, the sheriff has spoken. Cheap money’s riding back into town, and Powell’s blasting the bears out of the saloon with a six-shooter full of free cash.

If you read all of this, congrats for having a 10 second attention span (better than me). As always, here’s our heatmap for today.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Meta, Google, Amazon, Intel, Tesla, and Apple as mentioned in the article.