A ceasefire that had held for barely three weeks effectively collapsed this week, with Iran striking commercial tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and Washington hitting back with fresh air strikes.
Brent crude jumped more than 5% in a single session, just as Tehran buried its assassinated Supreme Leader - market ructions that landed in the middle of a second, equally consequential story in tech.
Samsung's record quarterly profit and SK Hynix's US$26.5 billion Nasdaq debut tried to steady an AI-memory trade already rattled by reports that China's DeepSeek is designing its own chip.
All the top moves, shakes, and market-moving moments from Azzet's editorial team, right here in your weekly business wrap every Friday (10 July 2026).
Monday
The week opened in Tehran, where three sons of assassinated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei attended funeral prayers.
His own son and anointed successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, stayed away from public view amid reports he was seriously injured in the airstrike that killed his father.
Khamenei was killed alongside several relatives on 28 February, the first day of a war that ran nearly four months.
Washington and Tehran signed a memorandum of understanding on 17 June, reopening the strait and setting a 60-day window to negotiate something permanent.
That truce had barely a fortnight to breathe before a cargo vessel reported coming under attack in the Red Sea.
UK maritime authorities logged a distress signal roughly 30 nautical miles off Yemen's Al Hudaydah and urged vessels in the area to transit with caution.
OPEC+ used the same window to nudge supply higher all the same, with seven core members agreeing to lift output by 188,000 barrels a day from August.
It was the fifth consecutive monthly increase, made squarely on the assumption that the Hormuz calm would hold.
It didn't hold for long, though Monday's other headline was rather more sedate.
EasyJet's board agreed in principle to Castlelake's fifth and much-improved takeover proposal, a £6.90-a-share cash offer valuing the budget carrier at up to US$7.3 billion.
That represents a 73% premium to where its stock traded before the private investment firm first circled in May.
Foxconn rounded out the day by reporting a 39.8% jump in second-quarter revenue to NT$2.513 trillion (US$78.71 billion), beating estimates on the strength of AI server demand.
Even so, the world's largest contract electronics maker flagged caution over what it called a "volatile" global political and economic backdrop, a line that would look prescient within 48 hours.
Tuesday
Wall Street had already banked its own good news by the time Asian markets opened.
The Dow closed above 53,000 for the first time on Monday, as chip stocks led a broad rally on renewed AI optimism.
Tuesday's data offered a reminder that the U.S. economy is still absorbing the conflict's aftershocks.
The Institute for Supply Management's services index eased to 54.0 in June from 54.5 in May.
Its employment gauge, though, returned to growth for the first time in four months, helped along by hiring tied to the football World Cup.
In dealmaking, Vertex Pharmaceuticals agreed to pay US$10 billion for Crinetics Pharmaceuticals, a deal that doubled the target's share price in after-hours trading.
It gives Vertex its first foothold beyond cystic fibrosis, via a newly launched treatment for the rare hormonal disorder acromegaly.
Lockheed Martin went shopping too, agreeing to buy Ultra Maritime for US$3.45 billion to bolster its sonar, torpedo defence and underwater surveillance capabilities as governments worldwide lift spending on maritime security.
Samsung's preliminary results then confirmed the week's second dominant thread, landing at a record 89.4 trillion won (US$58.4 billion), more than 19 times the year-earlier figure.
That was enough to make the Korean group the most profitable listed technology company on the planet for the quarter, Nvidia and Apple included.
It should have been an unambiguous win, yet South Korea's Kospi fell almost 5% on the news.
The index was punished less by the earnings than by a report that China's DeepSeek is designing its own AI chip, reviving an old question about how much silicon this boom genuinely needs.
Australia's National Rugby League closed the day with a record of its own, striking an A$5.3 billion (US$3.7 billion) media rights deal with Foxtel, Nine Entertainment and Sky NZ.
The seven-year arrangement runs from 2028 to 2034 and edges out even the AFL's A$4.5 billion deal on a per-year basis.
Wednesday
The fragile calm broke properly on Wednesday, when Iran struck three commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz, including a Qatari-owned LNG carrier and a Saudi tanker.
Washington responded by revoking Tehran's oil-sale waiver and launching a series of strikes against Iranian targets.
Brent jumped more than 5%, and West Texas Intermediate rose 4.4% to US$73.52.
Speaking from a NATO summit in Ankara, President Trump went further still, declaring the June memorandum of understanding "over" and casting doubt on whether further diplomacy with Tehran was worth pursuing.
Wall Street took the news in its stride rather than panicking outright, with the Nasdaq edging higher even as oil-sensitive industrial names dragged the Dow down more than 1%.
It was a split tape that said more about sector positioning than about any consensus view on where this goes next.
Amid the noise, MasTec agreed to buy Superior Group for US$1.65 billion in cash and stock, adding electrical systems expertise to its power, transmission and communications business.
It's chasing what its chief executive called one of the most compelling infrastructure opportunities in the market: the AI-driven data centre buildout.
U.S. trade figures carried a version of that same signal, widening 42.2% to US$77.6 billion in May as capital goods imports hit a record US$128.0 billion.
ANZ analysts noted the trade gap in computers, peripherals and semiconductors alone stood at US$44.1 billion, or around 57% of the entire shortfall.
Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern edged their proposed US$85 billion transcontinental merger closer to approval.
They offered the Surface Transportation Board possible divestitures of jointly owned rail infrastructure to blunt objections from rival operators BNSF, CSX and Canadian National.
In London, culture secretary Lisa Nandy signalled Britain could still intervene in the Paramount takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery on media plurality grounds.
The Competition and Markets Authority is due to rule on 7 August, despite the deal having already cleared regulators in the United States, China, Australia, Germany, France and Saudi Arabia.
Thursday
Tehran replied in kind on Thursday, striking U.S. military infrastructure across Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar.
The attacks came as Khamenei's remains were carried toward the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad.
Iranian state media reported 14 people killed and 78 injured across five provinces from the preceding two days of U.S. strikes, several of which landed near the perimeter of the Bushehr nuclear plant.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard said tanker traffic moving under its own supervision had recovered to only about half of pre-war levels.
It warned that any further U.S. intervention would draw a "crushing response", leaving the 60-day negotiating window agreed in June looking considerably shakier than it did a fortnight ago.
Federal Reserve minutes released this week added a dose of uncertainty of their own.
Officials are split between those who see rates finishing the year at or below the current 3.5%-3.75% band, and an equally sized group who think they will need to go higher.
Warsh himself described the split to reporters as a "family fight".
Having flagged the idea at that same June meeting, Warsh this week named the leadership of five task forces covering communications, the balance sheet, data, inflation frameworks, and productivity and jobs.
He drafted in venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, former Walmart chief executive Doug McMillon, Harvard's Raj Chetty and ex-Fed governor Jeremy Stein, all reporting back by year end.
Apple deepened its own bet on U.S. manufacturing, signing a deal worth more than US$30 billion with longtime supplier Broadcom.
The agreement covers more than 15 billion custom chips to be produced domestically by 2031, including US$1.5 billion to expand Broadcom's Fort Collins, Colorado, facility.
SK Hynix priced its own headline listing on Thursday, setting Nasdaq depositary receipts at US$149 each to raise roughly US$26.5 billion.
That's a touch below the US$29 billion originally targeted, but still enough to rank as the largest first-time U.S. listing by a foreign company, with institutional demand reportedly running at seven times the available stock.
Jeff Bezos also went looking for outside capital, with Blue Origin reportedly seeking US$10 billion from investors including Coatue Management at a valuation of US$130 billion.
It would be the company's first funding round to include anyone other than Bezos himself since it was founded in 2000.
Cameron Drummond's own commodities wrap captured the week's whiplash in numbers, with Brent settling at US$77.92 a barrel and gold sliding to US$4,087/oz.
That unwound a dovish Fed repricing that had carried gold and silver to multi-month highs only days earlier, as traders moved the odds of a Fed hike by September back up to around two-thirds.
Australian superannuation members had rather more to smile about, with SuperRatings estimating a median balanced return of 9.1% for the year to 30 June.
That's a sharp recovery from the 2.8% posted in the nine months to March, when the outbreak of the Iran conflict hammered markets.
The Compensation Scheme of Last Resort's revised FY27 levy has blown out 44% to A$198.1 million, dwarfing its nominal A$20 million cap.
The blowout is driven largely by the long tail of the Dixon Advisory collapse and the first wave of claims from the Shield and First Guardian master fund failures.
Levi Strauss beat on every headline number and still couldn't catch a bid, with shares sliding 5.9% in after-hours trading.
That came despite adjusted earnings of 28 cents against a 24-cent estimate and an upgraded full-year outlook, a reminder that a beat-and-raise only buys goodwill until the next print.
Washington closed out the day still sitting on a bipartisan housing affordability bill that passed both chambers with overwhelming majorities.
President Trump dismissed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act as a "big yawn", preferring to push his own, more divisive SAVE America voter-ID legislation instead.
Friday
Khamenei was laid to rest in the early hours of Friday at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, one of Shia Islam's holiest sites.
The burial concluded six days of processions that authorities used as a deliberate show of strength, after a war that killed more than 3,000 people and inflicted billions of dollars of infrastructure damage.
The mood by Friday was calmer than the week's escalation suggested it might be.
President Trump struck a notably softer tone from the same Ankara summit, a day after declaring the ceasefire dead.
He told reporters he did not expect the latest exchange to escalate into full-blown conflict, and that any further action would "only make it safer, including for oil".
SK Hynix's American stocks will begin changing hands on the Nasdaq under the temporary ticker SKHYV, ahead of converting to the permanent (NASDAQ: SKHY) listing on Monday.
Asian chip and AI-linked stocks were broadly firmer, as the region digested the scale of institutional demand for the offering.
New York rounded out the week in court rather than on a trading floor, as attorney-general Letitia James sued 3M, DuPont, Chemours and Corteva over so-called forever chemicals.
She alleged the companies knew as early as the 1970s and 1980s that PFAS compounds were toxic and sold them regardless, with the state now seeking mandatory cleanup funding and consumer warning labels.
And in Mission Critical, China has been quietly cracking down on rare earths leaks.
Week ahead:
- SK Hynix's first full week of trading - the permanent SKHY ticker takes over on Monday, and any gap between the Nasdaq receipts and the Seoul-listed shares will say plenty about how durable this week's chip repricing really is.
- Whether the truce survives the weekend - the 60-day negotiating window from June's memorandum of understanding is still technically running, but Iran's "crushing response" warning has not yet been tested.
- The next FOMC meeting on 28-29 July - the first real chance to see whether Warsh's "family fight" tips toward the dot plot's flagged hike or another extended hold.
- Castlelake's put-up-or-shut-up deadline on 3 August - either a firm offer for easyJet or the whole process unwinds.
- The CMA's ruling on 7 August - on whether Britain refers the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery deal for a fuller antitrust investigation.
- Third-quarter DRAM and NAND contract talks - suppliers are said to be pushing for increases above 20%, the cleanest read yet on whether the memory shortage still holds real pricing power.
