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Wraps & Blogs
Commodities Wrap: Gold retreats as US yields bite hard
Gold shed another leg as rising bond yields and a stronger dollar erased the safe-haven bid, copper pulled back from its COMEX record to US$12,000 per tonne, and the Hormuz oil shock quietly crossed a milestone markets have been slow to price - cumulative output losses closing in on one billion barrels. Energy and base metals kept absorbing the Gulf conflict's fallout, with the Strait closure holding more than 10 million barrels pre day (mb/d) offline and freight rerouting reshaping supply chains into the crisis's third month. Gold - which ran on geopolitical fear through Q1 - got undercut by the very inflation it helped create, a reversal that has wrong-footed the speculative long books built through February and March. ANZ Research's Daniel Hynes and Soni Kumari, in their weekly Commodity Exchange note: gold's inverse rate correlation has strengthened materially since Gulf hostilities escalated in late February. With the 10-year Treasury yield now at 4.585%, institutional desk unwinds have emerged as the dominant near-term price driver, overwhelming the geopolitical bid that carried the metal through Q1. China's April industrial output, retail sales, and property prices landed on Monday - the first comprehensive r
Wraps & Blogs
Azzet Unpacked: Records on one side, reckoning on the other
Wall Street extended its winning streak to six consecutive weeks, inflation hit its highest reading since 2023, Kevin Warsh took the Fed chair, Trump flew to Beijing, and copper broke COMEX records on a sulphur crunch nobody saw coming - a week in which the market and the macro data were operating from entirely different sets of assumptions. Let's dig in.MondayMarkets open at record highs on payrolls beat The S&P 500 and Nasdaq entered the week at fresh record highs, carried there on Friday by an April payrolls report that beat estimates comfortably - 115,000 jobs added against a consensus of 62,000 - and by a sixth consecutive week of gains that has become the longest winning streak for both benchmarks since 2024. The Nasdaq surged 4.5% for that prior week and the S&P 500 added 2.3%, with the Dow lagging at 0.2% - a gap that neatly captures the bifurcation between AI-driven momentum and the broader industrial economy that underpins it. With 89% of S&P 500 companies having reported first-quarter results, 84% delivered a positive earnings-per-share surprise and 80% beat on revenue, according to FactSet Earnings Insight - one of the strongest reporting seasons on record, and the fundamental floor beneath a market that is
Wraps & Blogs
Commodities Wrap: Copper hits record on Gulf acid crunch
The ceasefire premium burned off as quickly as it arrived - Brent is back below US$103 per barrel, copper broke COMEX records on a Gulf acid crunch, and Westpac revised its oil call higher while gold slips on the inflation it helped create. The week's commodity moves split cleanly into two camps: those running hot because of the Middle East, and those running hot in spite of it. Oil and LNG remain hostage to the Strait; copper's supply problem runs through Chilean smelters that have lost their sulphur feed; aluminium is watching Gulf facilities that won't fire back up for at least a year; and gold has pulled back - not because the conflict risk has abated, but because the inflation it triggered is now the Fed's problem.GoldThe yellow metal had a hard week on the rates side of the ledger, with April's hotter-than-expected CPI reinforcing the case for a prolonged Fed hold and driving a further leg down from January's all-time high. Rising U.S. real yields and a resurgent dollar did the work that geopolitical noise couldn't, flushing speculative long positions off London and New York desks that had built through Q1. Westpac economists Justin Smirk and Luka Belobrajdic flag the clearing of those positions as broadly constr
Wraps & Blogs
Azzet Unpacked: Forward, comrades - the chips are in!
Iran's Strait of Hormuz crisis swung from near-collapse on Monday to cautious deal optimism by Thursday, pulling oil, equities, central bank decisions and Australia's trade account through the same violent arc. The AI earnings machine ran hot in parallel, with AMD surging 16.5% after hours on Wednesday, Palantir posting its best-ever growth rate, and Anthropic quietly passing OpenAI on revenue ahead of a US$900 billion (A$1.24 trillion) board valuation decision. Spirit Airlines switched off the lights, GameStop made a run at eBay, and Blackstone's private credit book began registering the first AI-driven write-downs on its 2021-vintage SaaS loan portfolio. And the S&P 500 is punching all-time highs. Not a quiet week.MondayTehran confirmed it had received a U.S. response to its 14-point peace proposal, relayed via Pakistan, though the core sequencing dispute remained unresolved from the outset. The framework deferred nuclear talks to a final stage, sitting directly at odds with Washington's demand that enrichment limits be addressed before any ceasefire arrangement could be formalised. Trump had already labelled the terms unacceptable in a Truth Social post over the weekend, though he acknowledged that discussions ov
Wraps & Blogs
Azzet Unpacked: Wages, dissent and Brent at US$114
The four magnificent United States hyperscalers blueprinted roughly US$695 billion (A$1.06 trillion) of 2026 AI capex, the Federal Reserve split 8-4 in its deepest dissent since 1992, Brent crude punched above $114 a barrel on reports the White House was being briefed on Iran strike options - and Wall Street still managed to print fresh closing records on Friday because Apple, Alphabet and Eli Lilly all cleared consensus - and that, evidently, was all that mattered. The week's record hikes, spikes, and worker strikes from Azzet's editorial team, every Friday (1 May 2026). It's about to get hairy.MondayThe week opened with the U.S. President cancelling envoy travel to Islamabad after Iran's chief negotiator left Pakistan having met only local officials, with Trump telling reporters Tehran had subsequently submitted a "much better" offer within ten minutes - negotiation theatre that has stopped surprising anyone watching on for more than a fortnight. Investor sentiment held up briefly as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq closed at fresh records on Friday's New York session, with semiconductor strength carrying the tape and Intel surging 23.65% on a stronger-than-expected Q2 revenue forecast. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer used a ca

Wraps & Blogs
Azzet Unpacked: Market, Hormuz heat rises as Cook exits
Wall Street rewrote its highs on a ceasefire extension that Iran's navy promptly tested with two container ship seizures, Tim Cook's successor was named at Apple, and more than US$5 billion of Western capital landed on Australian critical minerals projects. All the top moves, shakes and cooked market takes from Azzet's editorial team, every Friday (24 April 2026). Hold on tight.MondayThe week opened with a reminder that the Iran war's supply shock has barely started to feed through, after analysts warned markets were still under-pricing the risk of prolonged Hormuz disruption. Tehran spent the day dismissing Washington's overtures, with state broadcaster IRNA confirming Iran had rejected the latest U.S. peace talks proposal before shuttering the Strait again in response to the ongoing American naval blockade. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney added another fissure to the Western bloc, stating publicly that Canada's ties to the U.S. had become a structural weakness - an unusually blunt framing from the head of a G7 ally. Base metals managed to hold their ground against a firmer greenback, while Australia and Japan signed a deal to deliver joint warship construction that deepens Indo-Pacific defence-industrial ties
Wraps & Blogs
Azzet Unpacked: Earnings, energy excite your business week
Wall Street's biggest banks posted blowout quarters, TSMC kept minting money from AI chips, and consumer sentiment cratered to a 70-year low - all while the Iran war tightened its chokehold on global energy markets and Europe counted down the weeks before the jet fuel ran out. All the top moves, shakes, and petrodollar takes from Azzet's editorial team are right here in your weekly business wrap every Friday (18 April 2026). Hold on tight.MondayThe week opened with a dose of grim arithmetic for U.S. households, as the University of Michigan's preliminary consumer sentiment reading collapsed to 47.6 - the weakest print in the survey's seven-decade history and a 10.7% decline from March. One-year inflation expectations surged to 4.8% from 3.8%, the largest monthly jump since April 2025, as respondents overwhelmingly blamed the Iran conflict for eroding their economic outlook. The data landed alongside a Bureau of Labor Statistics report showing consumer prices rose 0.9% in March, pushing the annual rate to 3.3% and sending the Fed further from its inflation target. Gasoline prices drove most of the headline damage, surging 21.2% in the month - the steepest monthly increase since records began in 1967 - while the broad
Wraps & Blogs
Azzet Unpacked: Shaky truce a blinder for business this week
A fragile Iran ceasefire crashed oil 16% in a single session, the IMF downgraded global growth, AI deals kept flowing through the wreckage, and private credit reminded everyone it can, in fact, lose money. All the top moves, shakes, and Hormuz Strait's from Azzet's editorial team are right here in your weekly business wrap every Friday (10 April 2026). Oil markets spent the first half of the week grinding higher on war premium and Hormuz anxiety, only to surrender the lot - and then some - when Washington and Tehran agreed to a two-week ceasefire on Wednesday night. West Texas Intermediate cratered more than 16% to US$94.41 a barrel, its steepest single-day drop since April 2020, and Brent followed with a 14% plunge. Yet by Thursday morning, Iran was already accusing the U.S. of breaching the terms. Markets that had priced in months of supply dislocation were forced to reprice in hours, and the whiplash left commodity desks, airlines, and bond strategists all scrambling to recalibrate. Away from the barrel, the IMF formally abandoned its growth upgrade and replaced it with a downgrade, U.S. Q4 GDP was revised down to a limp 0.5%, and Carlyle joined Blackstone in reminding investors that private credit can gate yo
Wraps & Blogs
Azzet Unpacked: Good Friday ahead after crude business week
Ahead of the Easter break, investors were handed an escalating Iran conflict, a US$122 billion AI mega-round, aluminium prices at four-year highs, a $29 billion food distribution deal the market hated, and a reminder that the Strait of Hormuz has no single off-switch. All the top moves, shakes, and chocolate bunny flakes from Azzet's editorial team are right here in your weekly business wrap every Friday (4 April 2026). The Strait of Hormuz has been shut for five weeks now, and the best idea anyone in Washington can come up with is threatening to seize an Iranian oil island while simultaneously granting Moscow a sanctions waiver to sell more crude. Subsequently, Brent Crude posted its steepest monthly gain on record during March.Source: AzzetThe IEA logged an 8-million-barrel-per-day supply loss - worse, by its own assessment, than anything the oil market has previously recorded. Gulf aluminium smelters took direct hits from Iranian strikes, and U.S. consumer sentiment slid to a three-month low. None of which stopped OpenAI from raising $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation without ever having turned a profit, or SpaceX from filing for what looks like the decade's biggest IPO, or Oracle from sacking staff so it