Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander: Ready to Counter Any Hostile Action

Foreign media analysis indicates that U.S. President Donald Trump has been pressuring newly appointed Federal Reserve Chair Walsh to cut interest rates as soon as possible, but Wall Street investors are increasingly unanimously betting on the opposite outcome. The recent renewed escalation of tensions in Iran, the implementation of a new round of global tariffs, the ongoing data center investment boom, and sustained strong U.S. consumer spending have together heightened market and Federal Reserve concerns about inflationary pressures, reinforcing expectations that the central bank will maintain tight policy or even raise rates further. Markets widely expect the Fed to hold interest rates steady at its Wednesday meeting. However, whether Walsh, who took over as Fed chair at the end of May, can continue to suppress calls for rate hikes within the committee increasingly depends on whether inflation can improve sustainably. Current polls show U.S. citizens are dissatisfied with Trump’s economic performance, and higher interest rates will undoubtedly further undermine the economic outcomes the White House seeks. Trump has long advocated for interest rate cuts and reiterated this position again this week. Even if the Fed ultimately opts to raise rates, Trump may not initially target Walsh, and is more likely to direct criticism at other Fed officials. Trump has so far appointed three members of the Federal Reserve’s seven-member Board of Governors. He previously said: “Kevin is very capable, but he has a committee, and its members are all highly politicized. He wants to do the right thing, I know what he’s aiming for, but he needs the approval of some people who may have ulterior motives. Interest rates should be lowered.”

xAI announced the launch of Grok 4.5 and Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0. The latter is priced at $0.08 per minute of audio. On August 5, Grok-Voice-Latest will be upgraded from Grok-Voice-Think-Fast-1.0 to Grok-Voice-Think-Fast-2.0. (Source: Jinshi Data APP)

Bitfinex stated in a report that despite Bitcoin’s price falling from $82,000 to below $58,000, long-term holders have maintained net accumulation of BTC. However, alongside a concurrent weakening of selling pressure, their accumulation pace has slowed notably: net additions hit roughly 40,000 BTC in late May, dropping to around 14,000 BTC by late July. Bitfinex views the current market as being in a stabilization phase rather than having entered a substantive recovery.

Google DeepMind has launched its next-generation music generation model, Lyria 3.5, with key enhancements to music structure, lyric quality, instruction adherence, vocal performance, and song duration control. The model can directly generate full songs up to 3 minutes long, rather than just tens of seconds of audio clips. Per the announcement, Lyria 3.5 still adopts the latent diffusion architecture, generating outputs via diffusion in the temporal audio latent space. Its training data comprises audio paired with text annotations of varying granularities, while post-training is conducted through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning that integrates both human and critic feedback. All generated content is embedded with SynthID watermarks. However, Google did not disclose the scale, source, or quantitative benchmarks of the training data, only noting that it has achieved significant improvements in audio clarity and lyric instruction adherence compared to Lyria 2. Furthermore, Lyria 3.5 is initially integrated into Flow Music, which supports conversational music creation, stem separation, remixing, music publishing, playlist generation, and can connect with Veo to produce music videos. It also enables the development of audio plugins, music games, and custom DAWs, further integrating Lyria, Veo, and Gemini to build a complete ecosystem spanning music creation, editing, publishing, and distribution.

U.S. stocks opened lower on Wednesday, amplifying market pressure ahead of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decision later in the session. Negative sentiment was driven primarily by a sharp rise in oil prices, after Donald Trump told Fox News in an interview that the U.S. would launch a strong strike against Iran in response to a recent attack targeting personnel in the Middle East. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield edged up to 4.62%, approaching its year-to-date high. The 2-year U.S. Treasury yield—more sensitive to Fed policy decisions—rose by around 3 basis points to 4.3%, also near its year-to-date peak. Traders widely hope the Federal Reserve, led by Chair Powell, will signal that it views the oil price shock from tensions with Iran as temporary and will not rush to raise interest rates this year. However, some argue that a single rate hike would be reasonable, and would help calm the long end of the yield curve by demonstrating the Fed’s resolve to curb inflation.

Economist Claudia Sahm stated that unless inflation makes more substantial progress, the post-meeting statement will likely signal an upcoming interest rate hike. After Fed official Christopher Waller’s June meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) released a statement far shorter than its usual convention, ditching previous verbose, formulaic language and centering only on a simple core line: “The Committee will achieve price stability.” Sahm noted that while Waller is dismissive of forward guidance, she expects this statement to provide clearer clues about the Federal Reserve’s policy direction. Specifically, she anticipates wording along these lines: “Despite recent improvements, inflation remains above the Committee’s 2% target, partly due to supply shocks from Middle East conflicts and tariffs, as well as strong growth in artificial intelligence (AI)-related demand. If inflation stays high while the labor market remains stable, appropriate policy tightening may be needed soon to achieve price stability.” Sahm also believes the statement will frame the labor market outlook more optimistically, describing conditions as “broadly consistent with the goal of maximum employment.”