The Rundown — September 16, 2026

What's going on right now, in one place. Items stay plain text until one of them becomes its own entry below — then it turns into a link.

Macro & markets

• The Fed hikes 25bp to 3.75–4.00% — the first rate increase in three…
• Oil holds near $101–109 a barrel on the seven-month Iran war; the Strait of Hormuz is running at roughly 5% of normal shipping traffic.
• The Senate kills the CLARITY Act, 49–50 on cloture — crypto market-…

Bitcoin & crypto

• Bitcoin falls to roughly $76,000 as ETFs see $450 million in outflows — the largest since June — on the CLARITY Act failure.
• Strategy (MSTR) resumes buying after a ten-week pause: +4,603 BTC, taking its stack to 845,050 BTC — about 4% of all bitcoin that will ever exist.

Artificial intelligence

• Five frontier model launches land inside ten days — Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Meta's Muse Spark 1.3, and DeepSeek V4.1-Flash.
• OpenAI is reportedly shopping a valuation as high as $1.5 trillion while delaying an IPO on safety grounds.

Science

• The 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption may have chemically destroyed some of the methane it released — a finding that could reshape pollution estimates.
• A large real-world study links semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) to roughly 40% fewer asthma attacks.

Space

• SpaceX targets September 22 for Starship's first-ever attempt to reach orbit, deploying the first Starlink V3 satellites along the way.

First published on the Notebook, September 16, 2026.