--- title: "Nvidia's numbers and Warsh's first Jackson Hole land 36 hours apart" description: "Nvidia reports second-quarter results after the close on Wednesday, and Kevin Warsh gives his first Jackson Hole address as Federal Reserve chair on Friday. The two events test the separate pillars holding up US equities, and they arrive in the same week the Dow fell 703 points on a weak Walmart quarter and a renewed rise in Treasury yields." category: "Markets" category_url: https://boursel.com/category/markets author: "Daniel Okonkwo" published: 2026-08-21T10:52:00.000Z updated: 2026-08-21T10:52:00.000Z canonical: https://boursel.com/article/nvidia-s-numbers-and-warsh-s-first-jackson-hole-land-36-hours-apart tags: ["nvidia", "federal-reserve", "jackson-hole", "earnings", "us-equities"] --- # Nvidia's numbers and Warsh's first Jackson Hole land 36 hours apart Nvidia reports second-quarter results after the close on Wednesday, and Kevin Warsh gives his first Jackson Hole address as Federal Reserve chair on Friday. The two events test the separate pillars holding up US equities, and they arrive in the same week the Dow fell 703 points on a weak Walmart quarter and a renewed rise in Treasury yields. Two events next week will test the two things holding US equities up: the AI earnings cycle and the path of interest rates. Nvidia reports on Wednesday evening. The Federal Reserve's Jackson Hole symposium runs Thursday to Saturday. ## Nvidia, Wednesday Nvidia reports second-quarter results for its 2027 fiscal year on August 26, after the close. The company guided to revenue of about $91 billion, plus or minus 2%, and the analyst consensus sits at roughly $91.9 billion, [inside Nvidia's own guided range and about 1% above its midpoint](https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/08/19/nvidia-guided-to-usd91-billion-wall-street-penciled-in-usd92-billion/). That framing is more useful than the headline number. Nvidia has spent three years beating its own guidance by wide margins, and a consensus that sits inside the guided band means the market is no longer assuming a large beat. It also means the bar has moved to the outlook: what the company says about the next quarter, and about how much of the AI build-out it can see committed rather than announced. That question has become sharper as the financing of the build-out has got more expensive. Bond investors have begun charging more to fund data centers even for the strongest borrowers, which changes the arithmetic behind the orders Nvidia is being asked to fill. ## Jackson Hole, Thursday to Saturday The Kansas City Fed hosts its symposium from August 27 to 29 at Jackson Lake Lodge in Wyoming. This year's theme is "Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy," which puts stablecoins, tokenized deposits and the plumbing of payments on the formal agenda at the moment Congress is trying to legislate on exactly that. The reason this year's meeting carries more weight than usual is the speaker. [Kevin Warsh was sworn in as Fed chair on May 22](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/22/trump-kevin-warsh-fed-chair-interest-rates.html), succeeding Jerome Powell, who remains on the board as a governor. This will be Warsh's first Jackson Hole address in the job, and he has spent his first months in it reducing how much the Fed says in advance about its intentions. A chair who has pared back forward guidance gives a set-piece speech that carries more information than the same speech would have carried a year ago, precisely because there is less of it. ## What the Fed is actually deciding The September meeting falls on the 15th and 16th, and the question is not the usual one. The Fed [raised its policy rate range to 3.50%-3.75% at its July meeting](https://www.usbank.com/investing/financial-perspectives/market-news/federal-reserve-interest-rate.html) and held there, with three members dissenting in favour of a further increase. This is a tightening debate, not an easing one, driven by inflation running near 3.5% on the back of energy prices. Then the labour market intervened. July payrolls fell by 23,000 against expectations of an 85,000 gain, and [the market-implied odds of a September increase, which had been around 67% at the end of July, collapsed](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/07/odds-the-fed-hikes-in-september-tumble-following-big-july-jobs-miss.html). Futures now lean towards a hold. So Warsh arrives at Jackson Hole with inflation above target, a labour market that has just cracked, and a committee that was split three ways at the last meeting. Whatever he says about how he weighs those will matter more to the rate path than any single data point between now and September 16. ## The backdrop This week gave a preview of how the market handles bad news on either pillar. Walmart's US comparable sales grew 2.6% against expectations near 3.8%, its slowest in six years, and the Dow closed down 703.84 points at 52,759.21. Treasury yields rose the same day, with the 10-year at 4.69% and the 30-year at 5.24%. That combination, a consumer bellwether missing and yields rising, is what makes next week's two events consequential rather than routine. If Nvidia's guidance disappoints and Warsh sounds hawkish, both supports weaken at once. If Nvidia delivers and Warsh acknowledges the labour market, they both firm. Nothing here is a forecast of which. It is a description of what the market has arranged itself to find out, 36 hours apart. ## Sources - [Nvidia earnings, Jackson Hole to test pillars of stock rally](https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/nvidia-earnings-jackson-hole-to-test-pillars-of-stock-rally-4871219) - [Jackson Hole Economic Symposium](https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/jackson-hole-economic-symposium/) - [Nvidia guided to $91 billion. Wall Street penciled in $92 billion](https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/08/19/nvidia-guided-to-usd91-billion-wall-street-penciled-in-usd92-billion/) - [Odds the Fed hikes in September tumble following big July jobs miss](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/07/odds-the-fed-hikes-in-september-tumble-following-big-july-jobs-miss.html) - [Kevin Warsh sworn in as Federal Reserve chair, replacing Jerome Powell](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/22/trump-kevin-warsh-fed-chair-interest-rates.html)