Welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on what's moving markets and policy.
Negotiations between Washington and Tehran remain deeply stalled, now one hundred days into the conflict that Washington and Israel initiated. Talks are bogged down over frozen Iranian assets, with the Trump administration separately floating a proposal to redirect those funds toward Gulf allies for reconstruction — a creative but contentious workaround that signals just how far both sides remain from any durable agreement.
Shifting to earnings, Broadcom's stock fell despite a broadly solid quarter, and the lesson here is an important one for investors — whisper numbers matter. The street had quietly priced in figures beyond official consensus, and when Broadcom came in just short of that informal bar, the market punished it. Managing expectations around unspoken thresholds is now as critical as beating published estimates.
And on the infrastructure side of the AI trade, a real constraint is emerging that has nothing to do with chips or software. The data center buildout is running headlong into a shortage of electricians, line workers, and skilled grid technicians. The bottleneck is analog, not digital, and it has real implications for the pace and cost of AI expansion across the economy.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
