The four-month war between the United States and Iran moved towards resolution after the two countries signed an interim memorandum of understanding, the Strait of Hormuz swung back open, and crude, aluminium, and the geopolitical risk premium all copped the same gut punch.
Up the other end, Musk's SpaceX stole the runs with the biggest float in U.S. history, the opening salvo in a trillion-dollar listing season this week's Compute Economy series reckons is funded by a tight circle of firms passing the same money around.
Monday
Wall Street finished firmly in the green, the Dow tacking on 0.7% to 51,202 points, as Musk's record-smashing SpaceX float and rising hopes of an Iran truce carried the whole tape higher.
Washington and Tehran shook hands on ending their nearly four-month war, agreeing to lay down arms on every front and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with the formal signing pencilled in for Switzerland.
Part one of the Compute Economy series called Musk's rocket maker a data centre wearing a rocket, its idle Grok kit quietly turned into a compute-rental earner nobody at the company set out to build.
American consumer sentiment found its feet as petrol prices backed off four-year highs, finally giving households a breather after months of war-driven energy pain.
Anthropic pulled its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for every last customer after a U.S. export-control order landed, a rotten look for an outfit about to front the public market.
Tuesday
President Donald Trump declared the deal done, chalking the truce up as a personal win even as the messy details on sanctions and verification stayed firmly up in the air.
Part two picked apart how a flashy US$45 billion compute deal with Anthropic shrank to a committed floor nearer $7.5 billion the moment Musk started posting, a $37.5 billion gap investors had to take on trust.
U.S. factory output stalled in May, manufacturers treading water even as the artificial-intelligence build-out kept their order books fuller than the headline suggested.
Lachlan Murdoch's Fox got punched in the gut, off more than 15%, after agreeing to swallow streaming play Roku at a $22 billion enterprise value the market plainly choked on.
American homebuilder mood soured further as stubbornly high building and financing costs kept the sector on the back foot heading into the summer selling season.
The Reserve Bank stood pat on the cash rate at 4.35%, taking a breather after three hikes on the trot while it watches how tighter money and the oil shock wash through.
Wednesday
U.S. stocks finished a mixed bag, the Dow ringing up a fresh record while the tech names slid, a quiet arm-wrestle between cyclical optimism and AI valuations stretched thin.
The interim Iran pact edged closer to daylight, negotiators flagging that the thorny nuclear and sanctions questions were being shunted into a second round of talks.
Single-family housing starts slumped to an eight-month low, another tap on the brakes that says affordability is biting at the foundations of the U.S. building game.
Yum! Brands waved goodbye to Pizza Hut for $2.7 billion, splitting the chain between buyout mob LongRange Capital and Yum China as the delivery apps keep eating its lunch.
Part three signed off by mapping the merry-go-round of cash tying Nvidia, the AI labs and the cloud players together, and reckoned the real handbrake from here is power, not money.
Thursday
The weekly commodities wrap tallied the ceasefire's handiwork, crude and aluminium taking a beating on reopening hopes while gold and silver stole the show as inflation fears cooled.
The full interim pact landed in public, a 14-point memorandum running from a 60-day toll-free Hormuz window through to a proposed reconstruction kitty for Iran.
Warsh's Federal Reserve stood pat at 3.50% to 3.75% but came over decidedly hawkish, the new chair dangling a possible hike and spinning up five policy task forces.
U.S. retail sales jumped 0.9% in May, breezing past forecasts and underlining a shopper who has shrugged off war, dearer petrol and inflation that simply won't quit.
Bosch stumped up $36 million to settle U.S. claims it shipped sensors and software to blacklisted Huawei without the right licences, proof export-control enforcement still has bite.
Aussie growth super funds banked around 9% so far in FY26, a fourth cracking year on the trot off the back of international shares and the bounce from the March war scare.
Friday
This week's Mission Critical column unpicked the G7's vow to drag reliance on any single rare-earths supplier below 60% by 2030, a target aimed squarely, if quietly, at Beijing.
The Strait of Hormuz swung properly back open, Saudi supertankers and the big shipping lines transiting for the first time in 110 days as the U.S. lifted its naval blockade.
Intel shares punched through to a record high after Trump claimed Apple had agreed to design and build chips with the company on home soil, a boast neither outfit could be bothered confirming.
Julie Sweet's Accenture tumbled 18% even after a $4.18 billion cyber shopping spree, a softer revenue outlook and an Iran-related hit spoiling the whole party.
Week ahead:
- Oil and aluminium as the physical barrels and metal trickle back, with the gap between paper relief and tankers genuinely moving the thing to watch.
- The fallout from Warsh's hawkish pivot, with futures now leaning towards an October or December hike.
- The next cab off the rank in the float queue, Anthropic and OpenAI both with IPO paperwork lodged and a wall of lock-up stock building into 2027.
- November's expiry of China's one-year pause on its toughest rare-earth export controls, the genuine test of whether the G7 means business.
- Confirmation, or a quiet walk-back, of the Intel-Apple, Nvidia and Google foundry deals Trump trailed this week.
