PCE and Nvidia on August 26: Hour by Hour, and Why 3.3% Hides a Firmer Month

TL;DR

• Wednesday, August 26 opens with three federal releases on the same minute, 8:30am ET: July personal income and outlays (the PCE report), the second estimate of Q2 GDP, and July durable goods orders.
• The Cleveland Fed nowcast has core PCE at 3.29% year over year, which rounds to June's 3.3%. The movement is underneath: 0.25% on the month against June's 0.1%.
• Portfolio management fees rose 6.5% in July's PPI. PCE prices financial services off the PPI and CPI does not cover them at all, which is why forecasters redo their PCE math after a PPI release rather than before.
• Nvidia reports at roughly 4:20pm ET, call at 5:00pm. Salesforce and CrowdStrike hold calls at 5:00pm too, so three sets of guidance arrive on one minute.
• Warsh gives his first Jackson Hole keynote on Friday, August 28. August 26 is the last major inflation print before he speaks, and it lands 21 days before the September 16 FOMC.

What Time Is the PCE Report on August 26?

8:30am ET, and it does not arrive alone. The BEA release schedule puts July personal income and outlays and the second estimate of Q2 GDP in the same slot, and the Census Bureau indicator calendar puts July durable goods orders there as well.

Three agencies, one minute. The market gets an inflation gauge, a growth revision and a capex proxy simultaneously, which usually means the first fifteen minutes of the reaction are noise while desks work out which release moved what.

The Board

One Wednesday carrying the inflation print and the AI verdict, 48 hours before Wyoming.

Hour by Hour

Time (ET)	What lands	The number to hold it against
8:30am	July PCE price index	June: 3.7% headline, 3.3% core, year over year
8:30am	Q2 GDP, second estimate	Advance estimate 1.5%, after 2.1% in Q1
8:30am	July durable goods orders	The capex read the AI trade leans on
9:30am	Opening bell	Cash trades an hour after the prints
4:00pm	Closing bell
4:20pm	Nvidia fiscal Q2 results	Guide $91bn, 75% gross margin, zero China
5:00pm	Nvidia, Salesforce, CrowdStrike calls	Three guides, one minute

Dates for the rest of the slate are in the earnings calendar.

Why 3.3% Will Understate What Happened in July

The year-over-year core rate is going to look like nothing changed. Cleveland Fed nowcasting, updated August 14, has July core PCE at 3.29% against June's 3.3%, and headline at 3.65% against 3.7%. Read the top line alone and July was a month in which American inflation stood still.

The monthly rate says otherwise. The same nowcast has core PCE rising 0.25% in July after 0.1% in June, per the BEA's June report. Two and a half times the pace, hidden by a base effect in the year-ago month.

Part of that comes from a line most inflation coverage skips. Portfolio management fees rose 6.5% in July, the largest contributor to the increase in final demand services in the BLS producer price release. PCE takes its portfolio management prices straight from the PPI. CPI does not measure them at all. So the July CPI at 3.4% headline, which landed dead on the nowcast, never saw this component, and anyone extrapolating PCE from CPI alone is working without it.

I would not oversell this. The nowcast was refreshed on August 14, the day after PPI, so the 0.25% figure almost certainly already carries the portfolio management jump. The point is not that the model is behind. It is that the annual rate is what gets quoted at 8:31am, and on this particular print it describes July worse than the monthly figure does. The site's read on the July PPI gap covers the rest of that chain.

The GDP Line That Can Still Move

Second estimates rarely make news. This one has more room than usual, because the advance print was soft: 1.5% annualised in Q2, down from 2.1% in Q1, with consumer spending, investment and exports offset by falling government spending and rising imports.

A revision that pulls 1.5% toward 1% while core PCE firms is the combination that makes a September hold look obvious and an October hike look strange at the same time. The target sits at 3.50-3.75%. That tension is the thing Warsh has to address two mornings later, and the Jackson Hole piece lays out what the September pricing currently assumes.

The Evening Is Its Own Event

Nvidia results land at about 4:20pm ET with the call at 5:00pm, against management's own guide of $91 billion and a 75% non-GAAP gross margin that assumes no data-centre compute revenue from China. The scenario work is in the Nvidia preview.

Salesforce and CrowdStrike hold calls at 5:00pm as well. For anyone watching all three, the practical problem is that the two software guides get read through whatever Nvidia said forty minutes earlier, which is a poor way to price either of them. My guess is that both get mispriced for a day and sorted out on the Thursday.

The One-Line Read

Everyone will quote the 3.3%. The number that matters is the 0.25% underneath it, and it reaches Warsh two days before he speaks.