Producer prices were flat in July. Consumer prices ticked up the expected 0.1%. Two clean, boring, on-target inflation prints in two days, and futures moved… a little. Politely. Like a guest nodding at a story they’ve already heard.

I keep thinking about the headline that ran alongside all this: “Inflation doesn’t bother investors like it used to. It’s all about AI now.” Which is either the most honest sentence in financial media this month or a confession dressed up as an observation. Six weeks ago this same market convulsed over a single wholesale gasoline number. Rate-hike odds swung on comma placement in Fed statements. Now the actual data — the thing every strategist spent 2026 insisting was the whole ballgame — lands soft and nobody moves, because the real question isn’t “what will the Fed do” anymore, it’s “will CoreWeave’s numbers keep justifying the capex.” Inflation used to be the weather. Now it’s background noise under a different forecast.

That’s not investors getting complacent, exactly — it’s a genuine reallocation of attention, and attention is the scarcest thing on a trading desk. When Nvidia lines up $500 billion from Wall Street’s biggest balance sheets and Intel raises another $20 billion off “AI demand accelerating,” the macro print that used to move the whole tape becomes a rounding error next to whether the AI story still compounds. Which is its own kind of risk nobody’s pricing: if CPI stops mattering, it’s not because inflation stopped mattering. It’s because something bigger is standing in front of it, and the day it steps aside, everyone remembers inflation was still there the whole time.

Meanwhile someone in Illinois is up $1.04 billion on a Powerball ticket, which is either the least efficient market in America or the only honest one left — at least the odds are printed on the back.

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