Morning Brief
“Economic D-Day”: Bessent Unveils Sweeping Iran Sanctions Today, Opening the Most Consequential Week Since July
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent holds a 2:00 PM press conference today to detail what he has called “the single greatest financial offensive ever marshalled...
Walmart's Worst Day Since 2022 Dragged the Dow Down 703 Points, and JPMorgan Says Buy the Dip
Yesterday's pre-market estimate undersold it: Walmart closed down roughly 9% to 9.8%, its worst single session since May 2022, erasing nearly $90B in market...
Walmart Beat and Raised Guidance, and Fell 5%: The GAAP Numbers Explain Why
Adjusted EPS of $0.81 beat the $0.74 estimate, revenue topped consensus, and the company raised its full-year outlook. Shares still sank roughly 5% pre-market....
OpenAI Just Lost the AI Revenue Race to Anthropic, and Nvidia's Entire Financing Web Is Feeling It
OpenAI's Q2 revenue grew 18% to $6.7B while losses widened to $12.3B. Anthropic more than doubled its own revenue to $11.6B, surpassing OpenAI for the first...
The Market's Calm Just Broke: Trump Threatens to Bomb Oman as Iran Declares “Full Offensive”
Yesterday this brief asked whether the market's muted reaction to an expired ceasefire reflected genuine confidence or building complacency. Overnight...
The Ceasefire That Wasn't: The US-Iran Deadline Passed Today With Zero Ships Through Hormuz
The 60-day US-Iran memorandum of understanding expired today with no extension and no deal. Iran's foreign minister says there was never a ceasefire to begin...
A Record Week Closes With a Missile Strike: Iran Hit Two UAE Tankers as the S&P Fell Just Short of 7,800
Thursday's close was the 27th record of the year, S&P 500 at 7,798.99, Nasdaq near a one-month high, on a second straight day of cooling inflation that pushed...
Cisco Posted Record Everything and Still Fell 4.6%: The Delta Rule Claims Its Cleanest Case Yet
Revenue up 18%, EPS up 23%, AI orders up 4.5-fold to $9.3B for the year, both beating the high end of guidance. Cisco shares still fell nearly 5% after hours...
CPI Cooled Exactly as Expected, but Overnight the US Navy Fired Live Missiles at a Ship Bound for Iran
July CPI landed at 3.4% headline, 2.5% core, both down from June and both matching consensus precisely, a clean, welcome resolution to the tension this brief...
Circular Financing Is Back, Now With a $500B Wall Street Consortium, and Oil Just Complicated Tomorrow’s CPI
Nvidia signed six of Wall Street’s biggest names, Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR, to raise $500B for AI infrastructure, and...