Bessent's yen bet, cold Argentine data centers set, and the summer box office net

The US Treasury Department is wading into foreign exchange markets, a Polish company is leasing half a thousand square miles of Patagonian grassland for data centers, and the summer box office just set a nominal record. This week's Indicator covers the mechanics behind each number and what they reveal about the incentives driving the Treasury secretary, the global hunt for cheap AI computing, and the fragile state of the movie theater business.

Bessent's Yen Bet and the Treasury Market

The first indicator is the current exchange rate of 153.63 yen to the U.S. dollar. The story behind the number is that the U.S. government has been actively buying Japanese yen, a move that culminated in Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly challenging the market to stop him. As Whelan Wong notes, Bessent is the same hedge fund manager who helped pull off a $10 billion bet against the British pound in the 1990s, so his interest in currency markets is not new.