The week that gave investors an Iran strike pause, a SpaceX IPO filing, bonds and stocks falling in tandem, and a reminder that private credit is not nearly as boring as its name suggests.
All the top moves, shakes, and red-hot takes from Azzet's editorial team are right here in your weekly business wrap every Friday (28 March 2026).
Monday
The week opened under the shadow of the Middle East conflict and the growing economic fallout from the Strait of Hormuz disruption.
Iran remained unfazed by Trump's 48-hour ultimatum, rejecting the President's demand to halt military operations and signalling no intention to back down from its closure of the strait.
Tehran declared the Strait of Hormuz open to non-enemy ships - meaning anyone not flying the U.S. or Israeli flag - but warned the waterway would be fully sealed if Washington followed through on threats to destroy Iranian energy facilities.
A generous definition of "open", by any measure.
Iraq declared force majeure on all its foreign-operated oilfields, with storage capacity at its limits and international partners unable to nominate tankers.
Production at Iraq's Basra Oil Company was cut by around 70% to just 900,000 barrels per day.
Brent crude surged past US$112 per barrel on the news.
The U.S. responded by deploying additional ships and Marines to the Middle East, reinforcing the military posture that has defined the conflict's fourth week.
Separately, the UK confirmed Iran had fired TOW missiles at its military base in the region, widening the scope of the conflict beyond its original U.S.-Israel axis.
On the credit front, Blackstone's flagship private credit fund recorded its first monthly loss in more than three years, falling 0.4% in February as investors pulled approximately $3.7 billion in redemptions during the first quarter.
The setback underscored growing stress across the $1.8 trillion private credit sector, where weaker borrower quality and concentrated software exposure are testing confidence.
Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon flagged concerns around underwriting standards and sector concentration.
Blackstone's own shares have fallen more than 28% this year - the kind of drawdown that tends to concentrate minds in investor relations departments.
Elon Musk announced that Tesla and SpaceX would jointly build advanced chip factories in Austin, with one fab supporting vehicles and Optimus humanoid robots and the other producing chips for AI data centres in space.
The "Terafab" complex will eventually produce one terawatt of computing capacity per year - compared with roughly half a terawatt currently generated across the entire United States.
The Federal Court found Macquarie failed to adequately monitor Shield, adding another chapter to the ongoing scrutiny of Australia's financial services oversight.
Tom Homan confirmed the deployment of ICE agents to airports, escalating the administration's enforcement posture.
Tencent plugged OpenClaw AI agents into WeChat, marking a significant step in the integration of autonomous AI into the world's most-used messaging platform.
Superannuation fund members were urged to maintain a long-term focus as war-driven market volatility dragged the median growth fund down an estimated 3.8% in March, per Chant West, reducing the financial-year-to-date return to about 2.5%.
Investors eyeing demographic shifts were reminded of the ageing boom property investors can't ignore, with projections suggesting more than 20% of Australians will be aged 65 and over by the 2060s.
Tuesday
Asset tokenisation moved further into the mainstream, with new research showing most institutional investors now favour it to access pre-IPO opportunities.
An EY-Parthenon and Coinbase survey found asset manager interest in tokenising assets rose from 40% to 64% year-on-year, though regulatory uncertainty remains the primary barrier, flagged by 67% of respondents.
The technology works; the rules around it remain a work in progress.
Estée Lauder entered merger discussions with Spanish beauty group Puig, a deal that would reshape the global luxury cosmetics landscape if it proceeds.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright outlined plans to bring more diesel to market, reflecting the administration's urgency as fuel prices climb on Middle East supply disruptions.
President Trump claimed Iran and the U.S. had held productive war discussions - a characterisation that Tehran swiftly disputed.
The gap between the White House version of events and everyone else's has become a recurring feature of this conflict.
The administration's energy priorities were laid bare with the announcement that offshore wind had been axed in favour of expanded oil production, a policy shift that pleased the fossil fuel sector but alarmed climate-focused investors.
Chicago Fed president Austan Goolsbee argued that inflation was a larger problem than unemployment, reinforcing the central bank's cautious stance on rate cuts and suggesting the bar for easing remains high despite softening labour market indicators.
U.S. and Chinese executives travelled to Beijing for a forum amid trade tensions, a diplomatic signal that commercial relationships are being maintained even as geopolitical frictions intensify.
In markets, an analysis examined how the S&P 500 has become NVIDIA's AI funding mechanism, exploring the circular dynamic between index concentration and the chipmaker's capital-raising capacity.
Synopsys climbed after activist investor Elliott Management took a position.
BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink warned the AI boom could worsen wealth inequality - a candid assessment from the head of a firm that has done rather well out of that same boom.
Wednesday
The information war surrounding the Iran conflict came under forensic scrutiny, with a deep analysis arguing that truth has become a casualty in the U.S.-Israel war with Iran.
The New York Times editorial board delivered a damning assessment of the Trump administration's false claims about the conflict's progress, while FCC chairman Brendan Carr's threats to revoke broadcaster licences raised alarm among press freedom advocates.
Growing speculation that the White House had fabricated a diplomatic off-ramp had already sent crude oil tumbling 13%.
If that price move was built on misinformation, the correction when reality reasserts itself will be correspondingly sharp.
The semiconductor industry braced for a separate escalation as foreign chipmakers moved closer to Trump's tariff crosshairs.
The 14 April deadline for the U.S. Trade Representative's Section 232 report will determine whether Washington moves to Phase Two - broader tariffs on chips at a rate Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick described as "likely to be 100%".
South Korea faces the sharpest pressure: Samsung and SK Hynix would need to find an additional $122 billion to match TSMC's US$250 billion U.S. investment commitment.
NASA cancelled its lunar orbit space station to build a US$20 billion base on the moon's surface, repurposing the largely built Lunar Gateway hardware as China advances toward its own 2030 landing.
U.S. business activity growth slowed to an 11-month low in March, with S&P Global's composite PMI dropping from 51.9 to 51.4.
Supply delays were the worst since October 2022, and selling prices rose at their fastest pace in nearly four years - a combination that pointed squarely at the Iran war's inflationary transmission.
GameStop's earnings slipped as sales migrated online, a trend that has been under way for the better part of a decade but continues to bite the retailer's physical footprint.
Shell's chief executive Wael Sawan warned Europe could face fuel shortages within weeks, telling the CERAWeek conference in Houston that the conflict's impact was moving west through global markets.
JPMorgan analysts said the disruption had already translated into outright shortages across parts of Asia, with oil and gas prices surging roughly 40% and 60% respectively over the past month.
Morgan Stanley warned sustained high energy prices could push the United Kingdom into recession by late 2026.
In tech, Anthropic rolled out computer-use capabilities for Claude on Mac, advancing the agentic AI race.
Arm revealed its first in-house chip targeting agentic AI, signalling the Cambridge-based designer's ambition to move beyond licensing into direct silicon competition.
The UAE labelled Iran's attacks economic terrorism, and Kuwait warned that closure of the Hormuz strait risked catastrophe for Gulf economies.
Australian inflation fell to 3.7% in February, easing from 3.8% in January and coming in below the 3.9% consensus forecast.
Trimmed mean inflation held at 3.3%.
The print offered modest comfort to the Reserve Bank of Australia, which last week raised rates to 4.10% in a split decision - five directors voting for the hike, four against.
Electricity costs rose 37% over the year as households burned through their government rebates, a reminder that headline disinflation and lived experience remain some distance apart.
Google DeepMind partnered with Agile Robots.
J.P. Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon warned AI could lead to significant job displacement, though offered no timeline for when that might apply to banking executives.
The UK announced new clean energy legislation for homes.
Trump offered a 15-point peace plan to Iran, and OpenAI confirmed plans to acquire Astral.
Thursday
Cracks in private credit markets triggered fresh investor alarm, building on the Blackstone signals from earlier in the week and reinforcing concerns about liquidity and transparency across the sector.
The asset class spent years marketing itself as a smoother ride than public markets; investors are now discovering that smoothness was partly a function of how infrequently the bumps were measured.
Meta and Google were held liable for social media harm, a ruling that could reshape the regulatory framework governing the platforms' responsibilities toward users.
SpaceX reportedly prepared to file for an IPO, sending space-related stocks sharply higher.
It would be the most anticipated public listing since the Arm Holdings debut in 2023, given SpaceX's estimated valuation north of US$350 billion.
Iran rejected the U.S. peace plan with a counter-offer, ensuring the conflict's diplomatic track remained stalled.
The Pentagon pushed defence firms to boost weapons output, a directive that underscored both the scale of ordnance consumption in the Middle East campaign and the industrial base constraints that have plagued U.S. defence procurement for years.
Washington asked Ukraine to trade Donbas for security guarantees, a proposal that drew immediate resistance from Kyiv and its European allies.
With fuel prices approaching 2022 highs, Trump tapped the ethanol lever - raising the blend rate for domestic gasoline as a demand-side response to the energy crunch.
The UK began trialling a social media ban for children, a policy experiment being closely watched across jurisdictions.
Meta laid off hundreds of staff amid plans to cut 20% of its workforce, pairing aggressive AI investment with equally aggressive headcount reduction.
The social media group's cost-cutting continued even as data centre spending expanded - a corporate strategy that only makes sense if you believe machines will do most of the work that humans currently do, and soon.
Across the U.S., long queues formed at airports as more TSA officers quit, a symptom of the federal workforce attrition that has accelerated under the current administration.
Microsoft's chief diversity officer exited in an HR overhaul, reflecting the broader corporate retreat from DEI-focused executive positions.
U.S. mortgage rates rose to their highest level in six months, adding further pressure to a housing market already constrained by limited inventory and affordability.
USPS requested a temporary price hike to offset rising fuel costs, a downstream consequence of the energy price surge that is now rippling through every layer of the U.S. economy.
The U.S.-Ukraine reconstruction fund launched its first project.
In a diplomatic development with significant trade implications, Xi Jinping confirmed plans to visit the White House in May.
Friday
The week closed with a rare and uncomfortable signal for multi-asset investors: bonds and stocks fell in tandem, undermining the 60/40 portfolio diversification logic that has underpinned institutional asset allocation for decades.
When both asset classes sell off simultaneously, the traditional hedge breaks down - and the culprit, as it has been all month, is the stagflationary cocktail of war-driven supply disruption and persistent inflation.
For portfolio managers who built their careers on the assumption that Treasuries rally when equities fall, this is an existential question dressed up as a bad week.
Trump extended the Iran strike pause to 6 April, buying time for negotiations that neither side appears eager to conclude.
The OECD lifted its U.S. inflation outlook, a revision that aligned with the March PMI data and the broader pattern of energy-driven price pressure feeding through to core goods and services.
GLP-1 drugs are rewriting the restaurant playbook, with the weight-loss medication's growing adoption forcing restaurant chains to rethink portion sizes, menu composition and demand forecasting.
The second-order consumption effects of Ozempic and its peers are now showing up in earnings calls from food services to grocery - a disruption no one in the hospitality sector had on their risk register two years ago.
Retailers warned of price hikes if the Middle East war continues, translating the energy supply chain disruption into a consumer-facing inflation threat that shoppers will notice at the checkout.
Merger activity offered a rare bright spot: Pernod Ricard discussions lifted Brown-Forman shares, reviving deal speculation in the spirits sector after a prolonged period of M&A drought.
Gulf states condemned Iran's energy strikes, with a coordinated statement that reflected the widening regional frustration with Tehran's disruption to hydrocarbon flows.
Apple added four major partners to its U.S. supply chain, a reshoring move consistent with the administration's broader push to bring manufacturing onshore - and a hedge against the semiconductor tariff escalation looming on 14 April.
Meta increased data centre spending to US$10 billion, confirming the AI capex machine continues to run at full capacity even as the company slashes headcount elsewhere.
The contrast between where Meta is adding resources and where it is removing them tells you everything about how the company's leadership sees the next five years.
