Brent crude fell $1.84, or 2.33 percent, to close at $77.01 a barrel on Friday. WTI dropped 1.73 percent to $73.84. Neither move waited for Trump’s actual decision on Iran — both priced the fact that he hadn’t made one yet.
The statement didn’t come from Trump’s own mouth. It came from his press secretary, reading a single paragraph to reporters on a holiday afternoon — the president would decide within two weeks whether to join Israel’s war on Iran’s nuclear program, leaving room, he said, “for potential negotiations.
The Federal Open Market Committee held its benchmark rate at 4.25 to 4.50 percent on Wednesday for the fourth straight meeting, and the vote itself carried no dissents — but the projections released alongside it showed a committee that no longer agrees on where it’s headed.
Two days of talks at Lancaster House ended late Tuesday with American and Chinese negotiators agreeing “in principle” to a framework meant to get the Geneva trade truce back on schedule — and the mechanism at the center of the deal was the one both sides had been quietly weaponizing since April: rar
On Thursday, the wealthiest partnership in Washington ended in public, in real time, on two competing social media platforms — and by the closing bell, Tesla had lost roughly $152 billion in market value, the single largest one-day wipeout in the company’s history.
On Wednesday evening, a three-judge panel at the Court of International Trade ruled unanimously that Trump’s tariffs exceeded his authority under a 1977 emergency-powers law, and permanently enjoined nearly every duty imposed since April 2.
Markets had two days to sit with a threat before they got to trade it — Trump posted on Friday that talks with the European Union were “going nowhere” and threatened a 50 percent tariff on all EU imports starting June 1, then spent the Memorial Day weekend walking it back.
The Treasury tried to sell $16 billion of twenty-year bonds on Wednesday afternoon, and the buyers who showed up wanted more yield than the market had priced them for — the auction cleared at a high yield of 5.047 percent, the highest since the bond’s reintroduction.
Moody’s waited until after the closing bell on Friday, May 16, to drop the notice — the United States no longer holds a perfect credit rating from any of the three major agencies, the downgrade to Aa1 from Aaa ending a run that had lasted since 1917.
One day after the words “historic trade deal” left the Oval Office, the fine print for imported cars was still being written — on May 8, President Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the general terms of a US-UK Economic Prosperity Deal, and it moved not a single ship, only a quota.
On Wednesday, the Federal Open Market Committee voted twelve to zero to hold the benchmark rate at 4.25 to 4.50 percent, the fourth straight meeting without a move since the cut in December — and buried inside the same two-page statement was a word the Fed had avoided since the Volcker era.
HSBC reported the kind of quarter that looks solid until the warning line starts working on the balance sheet.
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