Good morning and welcome to Markets Desk.
Brent crude is pulling back today but remains sharply elevated, trading at just under one hundred eight dollars a barrel this morning, down roughly three dollars from yesterday but still more than forty dollars higher than where it sat a year ago. That sixty-three percent annual gain is keeping energy costs front and center for investors and policymakers alike.
Feeding directly into that energy story, Xi Jinping met with Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Tim Cook, and other American executives traveling with President Trump, telling the delegation that China will open wider to foreign business. The signal matters enormously given how deeply American technology and manufacturing depend on Chinese supply chains, and how much tension over trade has rattled global markets in recent months.
That dependency is precisely the vulnerability one of Tesla's original battery designers is now warning about publicly. If China halted exports of battery-grade graphite tomorrow, nearly one hundred thousand American jobs could vanish within a week. EV assembly, grid storage, and battery production lines all stop without it. China has already imposed export controls, making this less a hypothetical than a slow-moving crisis demanding a domestic supply chain response.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
