Global Headlines to Know Before U.S. Stock Market Opens on Friday

China's new aggregate financing amounted to CNY 1.41 trillion in July, with RMB loans decreasing by CNY 340 billion, while M2 grew by 7.7% year-on-year.

Unexpectedly turning negative! U.S. retail sales fell by 0.6% month-on-month in July, marking the largest decline in over a year.

Is a September rate hike a certainty? Senior Japanese policymakers have frequently signaled that the pace of interest rate hikes will also accelerate.

Will the midterm elections become a watershed moment for the AI bull market? BofA's Hartnett: If the Republican Party retains control of the Senate, AI stocks could "soar" all the way to 2027.

South Asia confirmed that prices of electronic materials have doubled this year, with fiberglass cloth facing the most severe shortage.

Moutai: Net profit for the first half of 2026 was CNY 44.517 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 1.95%.

Report: Apple is training a China-specific AI large model, with Alibaba participating and providing support.

OpenAI and Anthropic launched a new metric—"cost-per-task"—to better measure AI costs.

NVIDIA's CPO switches have entered full mass production, ushering AI data centers into the "silicon photonics era"!

Just in! Z.AI released the GLM-5.3 model, "built for coding," with performance comparable to Fable 5.

Enthusiasm for AI trading has returned, with U.S. tech stocks rising in pre-market trading; Micron surged more than 3%, international oil prices rose, and spot gold dipped slightly.

The Nikkei 225 Index closed up 0.6%, the Shanghai Composite Index closed up 0.01%, and the Hang Seng Index closed down 1.1%.