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Wraps & Blogs

Wraps & Blogs
Commodities Wrap: Weekend supply shocks pump up crude
The global commodities market faced distinct macro-driven adjustments for the week ending 5 June 2026. A muscular United States dollar combined with climbing Treasury yields to trigger an aggressive paper asset liquidation across the industrial and precious metals markets. The week’s defining developments featured Brent crude sliding below US$94 per barrel as short-term geopolitical risk premiums softened across international exchanges, and LME aluminium consolidating near a four-year peak amid acute physical delivery tightness.Crude Oil (Brent US$93.09/bbl; WTI US$89.50/bbl) The seaborne oil tape registered notable downward movement as speculative long positions unwound late in the session. Reports from the U.S. Energy Information Administration confirmed that while global oil inventories are drawing down, rising Middle Eastern supply expectations have pulled Brent futures nearly 18 per cent lower than their previous monthly peaks. Upstream producers like ExxonMobil and Chevron are sustaining elevated production profiles, but macroeconomic headwinds have temporarily chilled the immediate geopolitical risk premium. While the broader market outlook anticipates a cooling in oil prices later this summer, crude exper
Wraps & Blogs
Azzet Unpacked: Rockets and records rock the business week
The ceasefire held up about as well as you'd expect when one side was lobbing missiles at the other's airport. Wall Street ignored all of it, setting fresh records for a third straight session as money poured into anything GPU-adjacent, with every major tech company racing to announce it was building more compute than the last. SpaceX set the price on the largest IPO in history, Anthropic filed confidentially for a potential trillion-dollar listing, and Berkshire's Greg Abel marked the post-Buffett era with a US$8.5 billion homebuilder deal. Aluminium hit a four-year high, Australia printed below-consensus GDP growth of 0.3% for the March quarter, and Washington dressed up its latest tariff salvo as a forced-labour enforcement action. All the top moves, shakes, and IPO takes from Azzet's editorial team unpacked right here in your weekly business wrap every Friday (5 June, 2026).MondayDell closed up 32.8% - its best session on record - after Q1 revenue of $43.84 billion, an 88% jump driven by a 757% spike in AI server sales to $16.1 billion. Talks between the U.S. and Iran continued through intermediaries even as Tehran's state media claimed comms had gone dark, with Trump pushing back on Truth Social while Brent cru
Wraps & Blogs
Commodities Wrap: Aluminium hits 4yr peak on squeeze
For the week ending 29 May, a muscular United States dollar and spiking yields triggered a broad paper liquidation. The week’s standout developments were London aluminium soaring to a four-year high on physical delivery squeezes, and a sharp precious metals correction following an inconclusive Trump-Xi Beijing summit.GoldThe yellow metal remained under pressure as macro traders adjusted to the implications of an extended restrictive monetary regime. Bullion's near-term momentum has been dulled by hawkish Federal Reserve repricing alongside a sharp climb in the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield. Institutional desks recently lowered their annual price forecasts due to a temporary slowdown in investor client interest. However, long-term support persists as emerging market central banks continue to accumulate physical bars for reserve diversification. Price: US$4,552.26/ozSilverSilver values dipped significantly, tracking the broader liquidation sweeping through safe-haven assets. The prompt tape was heavily impacted by macroeconomic changes following the trade summit in Beijing, given that more than half of global silver output is tied to industrial supply chains. Long-cycle buyers are noting that the silver-to-Dow ratio
Wraps & Blogs
US retail wrap: Consumers increasingly cautious
The United States first-quarter earnings season has reinforced a growing divide within the economy - consumers are still spending, but doing so more selectively than at any point since the post-pandemic recovery began. That cautious behaviour has emerged as a defining theme across major retail and home improvement chains, including Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe's, Target and Costco Wholesale, even as broader equity markets continue to reach record highs led by technology and artificial intelligence-linked companies such as NVIDIA, Palantir Technologies and Alphabet. Retail earnings, however, have offered a more grounded view of the underlying economy. The consumer remains active, but increasingly deliberate about where and how money is spent, balancing higher living costs, elevated energy prices and a persistently weak housing market. Across earnings calls, executives repeatedly described shoppers as resilient but increasingly “choiceful”, making sharper trade-offs across categories while continuing to prioritise essential spending.How retailers are reading the consumerWalmart used the term “choiceful” to describe customers trading down in certain categories while shifting toward private-label products, including among hig
Wraps & Blogs
Azzet Unpacked: China tightens as AI mints trillionaires
Markets were told the Middle East was on the brink of peace, then of nothing, then back again - and bought every dip regardless. Oil lurched from a 5% Monday faceplant to a Friday spike, equities treated a fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire as background noise, and three firms strolled up to a trillion-dollar valuation. Kevin Warsh took the Fed with inflation still loitering, China yanked the rare-earth handbrake again, and the Pope asked everyone to please disarm the robots. All the top moves, shakes, and billion-dollar stakes from Azzet's editorial team unpacked right here in your weekly business wrap every Friday (29 May, 2026).MondayTraders opened the week gleefully buying reports that Washington and Tehran had edged closer to peace, a brave thing to price given the cast involved. Crude obliged the optimists, shedding 5% as the war premium unwound on one upbeat headline and the collective decision to believe it. Wall Street, never one to overthink a good mood, drove the Dow to a record as de-escalation hopes coaxed money back into cyclicals. In the less giddy corner, Kevin Warsh was sworn in as Fed chair, inheriting a central bank where inflation never quite agreed to leave. NVIDIA's Jensen Huang floated a China CPU

Wraps & Blogs
Azzet Unpacked: A rocket ride of a week in business
It was a week shaped by two forces that fed directly into each other: A Middle East conflict cycling through another round of brinkmanship, and a fixed-income market delivering its most pointed message yet to the incoming head of the Federal Reserve. Wall Street slid to open the week as Treasury yields surged on fresh inflation concerns and the overnight news from the Gulf landed poorly. Donald Trump cancelled a strike on Iran, then threatened fresh ones, then declared talks were in their "final stages" - all within 72 hours. Treasury yields climbed to levels not seen since 2023. NVIDIA posted quarterly numbers that look invented. SpaceX filed to go public at a valuation that would place it among the five largest listed companies on earth. And Australia shed jobs for the first time in five months, with a result the market had not seen coming. All the top moves, shakes, and market-moving moments from Azzet's editorial team, right here in your weekly business wrap every Friday (22 May, 2026).MondayGulf-based drone intercepts and a fresh round of warnings from Trump - posted on Truth Social before most traders had finished their coffee - set the week's tone early. G7 foreign ministers convened to coordinate a respons
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