Good afternoon and welcome to Markets Desk.
Jay Powell's tenure at the Federal Reserve is drawing its final chapter, and the Financial Times is framing his legacy in stark terms. Powell navigated historic inflation, engineered a difficult tightening cycle, and critically, held the Fed's independence against direct political pressure from the White House — a stand the FT calls nothing short of heroic.
Shifting to the Middle East, Brent crude is holding near ninety-eight dollars a barrel as US-Iran nuclear talks remain unresolved. Indian equities opened marginally lower Wednesday, with the rupee slipping to ninety-five point seven five against the dollar. Markets are reading the uncertainty in Tehran as a supply risk premium that isn't going away quietly.
And on the AI hardware front, Nvidia's move into central processing units is sharpening competitive anxiety across the chip sector. AMD and Intel have long owned that territory, but Nvidia's GPU dominance and deep software ecosystem give it unusual leverage to disrupt from the outside — a dynamic investors in all three names are watching very carefully right now.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
