The Fed is signaling possible rate hikes as soon as next month, and that's bad news for stocks — especially the AI and tech names driving the market.

• New Fed chair Kevin Warsh has hinted he'd raise rates at September's meeting if inflation data comes in hot, a sharp shift after a rocky first 10 weeks.
• Several Fed officials — Kashkari, Daly, and others — are now openly calling for hikes, and Bank of America expects three this year.
• The setup rhymes with 2000, when a string of rate hikes helped burst the dot-com bubble and the Nasdaq later crashed 78%.
• Borrowing costs are already climbing: 30-year Treasury yields sit near a 20-year high, and companies like CoreWeave, SpaceX, and Google are paying more to raise cash for AI data centers.
• The worry is that pricier funding makes the huge AI spending boom harder to sustain, raising the risk of a tech-led selloff.

Outlook: Friday's jobs report and the August 12 inflation reading will decide how likely a September hike is, with the Jackson Hole gathering in late August the next big signal.