Wall Street booked its best quarter since 2020, Beijing blacklisted America's rare earth champions, Comcast broke itself in two again, and Meta went from having its compute rationed to reselling the surplus - all while Washington and Tehran kept shooting at the deal they signed.
All the top moves, shakes, and Fourth of July breaks from Azzet's editorial team are right here in your weekly business wrap every Friday (3 July 2026).
Monday
A weekend of tit-for-tat strikes tested the fragile ceasefire between Washington and Tehran, with U.S. jets hitting 10 Iranian targets around the Strait of Hormuz after a drone struck a laden crude tanker.
Crude firmed on the flare-up, with WTI adding 1.9% to US$70.56 and Brent 1.3% to $72.91, as traders kept their focus squarely on Hormuz rather than the weekend's peace communiqués.
Sundar Pichai's Google, it emerged, has been capping Meta's access to Gemini since March because it cannot build compute fast enough, leaving one of the world's richest companies rationing tokens like wartime sugar.
American consumer sentiment edged higher in June to 49.5 from May's record-low 44.8 on the Michigan survey, which still leaves the national mood the second gloomiest in data back to the 1970s.
Tuesday
President Donald Trump said negotiators from both sides would meet in Doha, and markets treated the mere existence of a calendar entry as progress.
Lee Jae Myung's Seoul unveiled a $576 billion plan to cement AI chip leadership, with Samsung and SK Hynix building two fabs each in the southwest and DRAM output to double within five years.
Our Commodities Wrap tracked crude's plummet on peace progress, with Brent unwinding almost its entire war premium as Strait of Hormuz flows pushed back above 10 million barrels a day.
Closer to home, the Reserve Bank's June minutes judged policy as 'somewhat restrictive' after three hikes this year, though the board left a fourth on the table with inflation still two years from target.
Brian Roberts' Comcast continued the media shake-up by freeing NBCUniversal and Sky into a standalone company, unwinding a 15-year marriage barely six months after it spun off Versant.
Wood Mackenzie warned that federal permit delays threaten $121 billion of wind, solar and storage investment, with 92 gigawatts of projects now facing heightened federal scrutiny under new Interior Department rules.
The U.S. Supreme Court granted Trump new power to fire independent agency commissioners, overturning 91 years of precedent while pointedly leaving the Federal Reserve off limits - for now.
Wednesday
Wall Street punched through to fresh records at the quarter's close, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq logging their best quarter since 2020 on gains of roughly 14% and 20% respectively.
Mission Critical unpacked Beijing's move to sanction U.S. rare earth rivals, blacklisting MP Materials and USA Rare Earth in a largely symbolic strike at the heart of Washington's supply chain build-out.
Hopes of a breakthrough dimmed as Tehran rejected high-level U.S. talks in Doha, declining to meet Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff and holding the negotiations at technical level.
U.S. job openings touched a two-year high of 7.59 million in May even as hiring fell again - vacancies are plentiful, apparently, so long as nobody actually fills them.
KKR bet $4.2 billion on surging power demand by acquiring EDF's North American renewables arm, the firm's largest single renewables investment, as data centres turn electrons into the scarcest commodity going.
Elliott Hill's Nike beat quarterly forecasts on revenue of $10.97 billion, though a 12% slide in Greater China and a tariff-refund-flattered profit kept the turnaround celebrations suitably modest.
Thursday
Two days of indirect negotiations in Doha ended with limited progress, covering shipping lanes and frozen funds while leaving Iran's nuclear programme - notionally the whole point - untouched.
American private hiring slowed to 98,000 jobs in June ahead of the official payrolls report, with ADP describing a labour market squeezed between soft demand and shrinking supply.
Giant Eagle swooped into Kroger's hands for $1.65 billion, handing chief executive Greg Foran his first major acquisition since the $25 billion Albertsons merger fell apart in 2024.
Azzet also unpacked what DRAM's whipsaw says about trading leveraged ETFs, after Roundhill's 2x memory fund RAM swung 17% in a single session on no cleaner catalyst than gravity meeting gearing.
Friday
Mark Zuckerberg's Meta went from compute-starved to compute landlord inside a week, as reports of spare capacity upending Wall Street's AI chip rally knocked Micron and SanDisk down more than 10% apiece.
Growth in U.S. jobs slowed to 57,000 in June while the workforce shrank by 720,000, a combination that dragged unemployment to a 12-month low of 4.2% for entirely the wrong reasons.
Russia launched a major missile strike on Ukraine, firing 74 missiles and nearly 500 drones at Kyiv in an 11-hour barrage that killed at least 21 people.
Alphabet's Google ran out of courtrooms in Brussels, losing its final appeal against the €4.1 billion Android antitrust fine and drawing an eight-year fight to a close.
Peace negotiations paused for Khamenei's funeral, with Qatar slating the next round for after the late Supreme Leader's burial on 9 July and both sides insisting the process remains on track.
Elon Musk's Tesla delivered a record 480,126 vehicles for the quarter and was rewarded with a 7% slide, its shares going into reverse in a textbook case of selling the news.
Week ahead:
- Geopolitics - Ayatollah Khamenei's burial on 9 July, with the next round of U.S.-Iran talks in Doha to follow and the 60-day Hormuz clock still running.
- Macro data - U.S. June CPI lands on 14 July, the release most likely to revive or bury the Federal Reserve rate-hike conversation.
- Earnings - Q2 reporting season opens mid-July with the big U.S. banks, before Tesla fronts the market on 22 July with the margin answers its delivery beat left hanging.
- Macro data - Australia's June quarter CPI on 29 July, the decisive input for the RBA's next move.
- Central bank - the RBA's Monetary Policy Board meets on 10-11 August with a fourth 2026 hike still live.
- Sector data - TrendForce's monthly DRAM and NAND contract print, the cleanest read on whether memory pricing power is holding or cracking.
- Policy - China's partial suspension of its strictest rare earth export controls runs to 10 November, a fuse Mission Critical will keep watching.
