Sturnella Signals | Vol. 1 · Issue 022 · September 16, 2026

Editor's note: This is market commentary, not investment advice.

U.S. retail sales rose 1.2% month over month in August, substantially stronger than the 0.8% consensus estimate, while the GDP-linked control group rose 1.4%. Import prices also increased 0.7% during the month, well above expectations for a 0.4% increase.

Meanwhile, the average 30-year mortgage rate has climbed to 6.97%, its highest level since May 2025, reflecting the rise in Treasury yields and the broader tightening in financial conditions.

Oil remains another variable. Crude pulled back toward $104 a barrel Wednesday as U.S. inventories increased, but continuing supply disruptions and Middle East tensions leave the inflationary energy channel very much open. The Federal Reserve is expected to raise the federal funds rate by 25 basis points Wednesday, which would mark its first increase since 2023.

Capital is also moving toward the labor constraint. DOE's Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation opened the $16 million PROSPECT Planning Prize, offering universities as much as $1 million each to develop implementation-ready programs for mining, mineral processing, recovery and recycling education. The prize sits inside DOE's broader $100 million PROSPECT initiative, whose near-term objective is to double the number of graduates with mining-, minerals- and associated supply-chain credentials across the United States. Applications are open through October 5.

This may ultimately prove more consequential than another funding announcement. On September 15, Deputy Secretary of War Steve Feinberg signed the Fostering One Strong Industrial Base memorandum, directing changes intended to reduce accounting, audit and compliance barriers separating commercial companies from the defense industrial base.

The Department intends to rely more heavily on normal commercial accounting and existing independent audits, confine government-unique requirements to the contracts and work that require them, and make greater use of competition and market pricing where functioning markets exist.

There is a particularly important principle underneath all of it: attach rules to contracts, not companies. For smaller technology and dual-use businesses, that distinction matters. A company should not have to transform its entire operating model simply because one line of business serves the defense market.

Two new opportunities are another signal that commercial technology is being pulled more directly into national-security missions.

There was no major newly disclosed mining-specific OT attack I would elevate this week. But one active threat remains worth carrying forward.

On August 19, NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE and EPA warned of threat activity involving Siemens S7 programmable logic controllers, including AI-generated exploitation scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools. The agencies identified Critical Manufacturing, Energy, Water and Wastewater, Chemical, Food and Agriculture, and Commercial Facilities among the relevant sectors, and also urged organizations throughout the Defense Industrial Base to implement recommended protections.

The issue is not merely Siemens. The broader targeting activity reinforces familiar OT weaknesses: internet-exposed devices, inadequate segmentation, weak access controls and insufficient visibility into the systems surrounding industrial controllers. For mining, the relevance is straightforward: crushers, mills, flotation circuits, pumps, conveyors and processing systems increasingly depend on PLC-controlled environments.

CISA released eight Industrial Control Systems advisories on September 15, spanning industrial monitoring, maritime systems, SCADA, power protection, enterprise engineering software and connected cameras.

The individual products are different, but the categories matter. SCADA platforms and remote monitoring systems sit close to physical operations. Protection equipment sits inside power environments. Engineering and lifecycle-management platforms connect people, designs and production. Cameras and other connected devices add another potential pathway into increasingly converged environments. For industrial operators, the attack surface is no longer simply the PLC. It is increasingly everything used to monitor it, configure it, authenticate into it, engineer around it or connect it to the rest of the enterprise.

CISA also released two important pieces of identity-security guidance on September 15. CISA and NIST finalized Interagency Report 8587, Protecting Tokens and Assertions from Forgery, Theft, and Misuse, focusing on the identity tokens and assertions underlying modern single sign-on, federation and API-based access. The recommendations address identity-provider and authorization-server architecture, key management, token verification and lifecycle controls, SSO and federation security, API access, and configurable and interoperable cloud-security controls.

The significance reaches beyond federal agencies. Tokens increasingly function as the keys connecting users, applications, cloud services and data. Stealing a password may compromise an account. Stealing or forging the right identity token can allow an attacker to impersonate trusted access and move through interconnected environments.

CISA, Australia's ACSC and partners also updated their guidance on Detecting and Mitigating Active Directory Compromises, expanding detection guidance around DCSync and Shadow Credentials. Active Directory remains especially consequential because compromising the identity layer can allow an attacker to escalate privileges, establish persistence and move laterally across the broader organization.

• KIHOMAC — Utah: 177 new aerospace and defense jobs announced.
• General Atomics — Mississippi: 125 new weapons-manufacturing jobs announced.

• Omnicom: approximately 15,000 positions.
• Conifer Health Solutions: more than 1,000 positions.
• Whyalla Steelworks: more than 500 positions associated with the Australian blast-furnace closure.

No major mining, energy-infrastructure or agriculture-infrastructure layoff announcement stands out strongly enough this week to force into the section.