The week the Middle East changed shape, a closed strait rattled every commodity desk on the planet, and Kevin Warsh got the Fed job - if he can actually get through the door.
All the top moves, shakes, and shipping lane straits from Azzet's editorial team are right here in your weekly business wrap every Friday (6 March 2026).
Monday
The week opened under the shadow of events that had already unfolded over the weekend.
U.S. and Israeli forces launched Operation Epic Fury on Saturday, striking Iranian nuclear and military sites and killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the process.
The 86-year-old had led Iran since 1989, and his death - confirmed by state media on Sunday - plunged the country into its deepest crisis since the 1979 revolution.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard declared the Strait of Hormuz closed, missile strikes hit U.S. military assets across the Gulf, and Tehran responded with attacks on Israel.
Russia and China condemned the operation, Turkey called it a clear violation of international law, and Trump posted on Truth Social that the bombing would continue until he achieved, in his words, "peace throughout the Middle East and, indeed, the world" - which is one way to frame it.
Energy markets moved immediately.
OPEC+ hiked output by 206,000 barrels per day for April, with Saudi Arabia having already been quietly boosting production by around 500,000 barrels per day in the weeks prior to the strikes.
Brent crude surged 5.3% to US$76.75, West Texas Intermediate up 5% to $70.40.
Airlines cancelled flights across the Middle East as carriers vacated airspace over the conflict zone, and shipping insurers followed, suspending cover for vessels entering the Gulf.
On the domestic policy front, Australia's CGT discount moved back into active consideration ahead of the May budget, with a Senate inquiry due to report on 17 March.
Grattan Institute modelling suggests trimming the discount to 25% could recover roughly $6.5 billion annually - a figure that explains why Treasurer Chalmers has stopped ruling it out even as he avoids confirming it.
The Netherlands this year voted in a 36% tax on unrealised gains; the political appetite for taxing paper profits appears to be travelling.
Berkshire Hathaway reported a 2.5% dip in Q4 net earnings to US$19.199 billion in Buffett's final quarter as chief executive, with full-year earnings down 25% to $66.968 billion.
Successor Greg Abel's shareholder letter pledged to preserve Buffett's discipline; the full-year numbers suggested the legacy is intact even if the most recent result was not its finest hour.
Elsewhere, Paramount's WBD acquisition moved closer to completion with early indications of substantial workforce reductions, Magellan and Barrenjoey confirmed plans to merge - combining two of Australia's better-known boutique investment operations - and U.S. producer prices rose more than expected in January, adding another data point to an inflation picture the Fed would rather not be looking at right now.
Tuesday
The conflict entered its third day on Tuesday with significant escalation across multiple fronts.
The U.S. Central Command confirmed Kuwait accidentally shot down three American F-15E fighter jets during an Iranian attack - all six crew members ejected safely.
A new front opened in Lebanon as Hezbollah launched missiles and drones at Israel, drawing retaliatory airstrikes on Beirut's southern suburbs that killed at least 31 people.
Trump addressed the campaign at the White House, noting it had been projected to run four to five weeks but warning it could extend considerably beyond that.
"We haven't even started hitting them hard," he told CNN. "The big wave hasn't even happened."
A Pentagon briefing confirmed U.S. forces had struck more than 1,250 targets inside Iran and destroyed 11 Iranian ships, with General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, saying to expect further losses.
Travel stocks tumbled broadly as disruption to Middle East flight corridors compounded concerns about fuel cost exposure across the sector.
The RBA flagged inflation uncertainty in light of the conflict, noting the oil shock introduced a material upside risk to domestic prices without offering a clear read on how persistent it would prove.
The already narrow path to further rate relief narrowed further.
Nvidia pledged $4 billion in new U.S. investments, a commitment that read partly as strategic positioning on the domestic manufacturing question and partly as a direct response to the broader geopolitical pressure on semiconductor supply chains.
Paramount and HBO confirmed plans to merge their streaming platforms, the latest consolidation move in a landscape that continues to narrow toward fewer, larger players.
Deutsche Telekom joined Starlink to expand mobile coverage in Germany - a partnership that reflects SpaceX's continued push into mainstream telecommunications markets.
Dwelling approvals fell in January as the apartment sector pulled back, while Life360 posted its first annual profit with users up 20%, a result that demonstrated the family safety app's transition from growth-at-all-costs toward a more sustainable operating model.
Wednesday
The financial consequences of the first four days of Operation Epic Fury became clearer on Wednesday, and not all of them pointed in the same direction.
Defence stocks rallied sharply, with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman surging in the U.S., BAE Systems and Germany's Hensoldt climbing in Europe, and Australian names DroneShield (ASX: DRO) and Codan (ASX: CDA) up 6.6% and 4.6% respectively.
The logic is familiar: sustained military operations generate sustained procurement.
Whether this conflict proves short and sharp or settles into a protracted exchange is the variable the market cannot yet price.
Australia's Q4 GDP came in at 0.8%, bringing full-year 2025 growth to 2.6% - the strongest per-capita result since December 2022.
Household spending rose 2.4% through the year, mining output was up 2.6%, and government and private demand each contributed 0.3 percentage points to the quarterly result.
The Commonwealth Bank had been pencilling in 1.0%; the 0.8% outturn was broadly within the range of realistic outcomes and unlikely to alter the RBA's trajectory in either direction.
AWS suffered an outage following a strike on UAE infrastructure, highlighting the fragility of cloud architecture concentrated in Gulf data centres.
Big Tech altered operations across the region, relocating staff and shifting workloads as the conflict's footprint expanded.
Trump ordered a Gulf shipping insurance backstop - effectively a federal guarantee for commercial vessels willing to transit Hormuz or adjacent waters - while also threatening trade action against Spain after Madrid pulled its planes from involvement in the Iran operation.
New York Fed President John Williams said tariffs were hitting firms and households, adding to the complexity facing the FOMC as it tried to read the oil shock simultaneously.
Eurozone inflation surprised to the upside, a result that arrived before the full energy risk from the Hormuz closure had been priced.
The ECB's forward guidance sits awkwardly against a backdrop of conflict-driven commodity pressure.
Anduril moved to double its valuation in a new funding round - a data point entirely consistent with the broader sentiment across defence investment this week.
Apple launched new M5 MacBooks at meaningfully higher price points, a pricing decision that will be watched closely as a signal of how much the tariff environment is flowing through to consumer electronics.
Australia's superannuation sector was urged to prepare for the grey wave, with funds facing the structural challenge of managing large-scale drawdowns across a membership cohort that built most of its balances during a decade of strong equity returns.
Thursday
Thursday brought the week's clearest convergence of macro, market, and geopolitical signals.
Azzet's analysis in the market rotation piece noted that Brent crude had settled at $81.40 - up roughly 10% since strikes began on 28 February - while the S&P 500 remained within 2% of all-time highs.
The index's resilience is explained largely by what is happening beneath it: the equal-weight S&P 500 has hit record highs, the cap-weighted index has stalled, and the gap between them reflects a rotation from hyperscalers into energy, materials, and industrials at a pace Penn Mutual Asset Management described as among the most pronounced on record.
Technology stocks were down 3-5% on the year; energy had gained more than 21%, materials were up nearly 18%, and industrials had added around 12%.
The U.S. military sank an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean - the first such naval sinking since World War Two.
The conflict's sixth day saw Iranian drone and missile attacks spread across Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, with Bahrain's Defence Force reporting it had intercepted 75 missiles and 123 drones since hostilities began.
Trump nominated Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve Chair, transmitting the nomination to the Senate.
The path is not straightforward: Republican Senator Thom Tillis has said he will block proceedings until a federal investigation into Powell - connected to the $2.5 billion renovation of the Fed's Washington headquarters - is dropped.
Trump had also attempted to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook, a move still pending a Supreme Court ruling.
Warsh inherits a committee divided on rates, a political context that has been deteriorating for months, and a war-driven commodity shock to navigate before he is even confirmed.
Broadcom's Q1 revenue came in at US$19.31 billion, up 29% year-on-year, with AI revenue surging 106% to US$8.4 billion.
CEO Hock Tan expects AI semiconductor revenue of $10.7 billion in the current quarter, and second-quarter guidance of roughly $22 billion came in well above the $20.56 billion consensus.
Broadcom's position in the custom silicon supply chain - translating hyperscaler chip designs into manufacturable silicon ahead of foundry production - has strengthened as cloud providers accelerate their AI spending.
Shares rallied around 5% in after-hours trade.
Nvidia confirmed it was winding down AI lab stakes in both OpenAI and Anthropic, a move that reflects the growing complexity of its position as both supplier to and indirect competitor of the major labs.
The timing is notable given the Pentagon's posture toward Anthropic had been in flux all week - Defence Secretary Hegseth had labelled the company a potential national security supply chain risk - before Anthropic resumed Pentagon negotiations by Friday.
BYD shares slumped as the domestic Chinese electric vehicle price war entered a new phase, with margins across the sector under continued pressure.
Adidas fell on disappointing guidance, a result suggesting consumer spending in key European and North American markets remains patchy despite an otherwise solid earnings trajectory.
The UK government cut its growth forecast to 1.1% for 2026, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves defending the fiscal framework as geopolitical and energy market pressures added new headwinds.
U.S. private payrolls beat forecasts in February according to ADP data, with 63,000 jobs added after a revised 11,000 in January, and the services sector hit its highest gear since 2022 - a counterpoint to the macro anxiety elsewhere that the FOMC will note but cannot act on cleanly.
Friday
The week closed with Iran signalling it was open to discussing a ceasefire, and Trump responding that it was too late.
The market took note and moved on.
In this week's Mission Critical column, Ottawa put real capital behind its critical minerals ambitions at the PDAC conference in Toronto.
Canadian Energy Minister Tim Hodgson tabled a C$2 billion Critical Minerals Sovereign Fund, a $1.5 billion First and Last Mile Fund, and 30 new international partnerships unlocking $12.1 billion in project capital across 12 allied nations.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford accelerated the Ring of Fire road construction timeline to a June groundbreaking with a 2031 completion target - several years ahead of schedule, with U.S. tariff pressure cited explicitly as the forcing function.
Total firepower mobilised across the programme sits at roughly $18.5 billion.
The IEA projects the six priority commodities - copper, nickel, lithium, graphite, cobalt, and rare earths - will require $65 billion in mine investment by the end of the next decade to meet demand.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed new 15% tariffs would come into effect this week, correcting last week's 10% implementation that fell short of the promised level.
Bessent said he expects tariff rates to work their way back to their pre-Supreme Court levels within five months, with the new instruments structured to withstand the 4,000-plus legal challenges already on the books.
Berkshire Hathaway restarted its buyback programme as CEO Greg Abel purchased stock personally - a signal that management views the current price as representing genuine value, not merely a capital management obligation.
Beijing ordered refiners to cancel fuel export deals, a move that compounds the global energy supply picture as Hormuz disruption continues to restrict tanker flows from the Gulf.
Apple announced a budget MacBook Neo at a lower price point than its M5 siblings launched earlier in the week, while Ferrari confirmed it is pushing ahead on EVs - resisting the industry-wide reversal of electrification ambitions that has claimed Stellantis and others.
The Federal Reserve formally closed the Wells Fargo enforcement action stemming from the fake accounts scandal - a bureaucratic footnote on a week that gave the Fed rather larger concerns to manage.
Autonomous vehicle startup OXA raised $103 million in new funding, and Australian household spending returned to growth in January - a modest domestic positive that will need to survive whatever oil-driven cost pressure the coming weeks deliver.
U.S. jobless claims and layoff data held at historic lows, a result that sits in increasingly uncomfortable proximity to a war-driven commodity shock and a Federal Reserve with no obvious clean path to either cutting or holding.
