Good morning and welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on what's moving markets and the world.
Israel launched retaliatory air strikes on Iran overnight, putting a two-month ceasefire under serious strain. The assault follows Tehran's earlier ballistic missile launch, and markets are watching closely. Oil is the immediate pressure point, with any sustained escalation threatening supply routes and risk appetite across the board.
Shifting to Asia, the Nikkei two twenty-five is in freefall Monday, shedding three point seven percent and falling below the sixty-four thousand one hundred level. That extends steep losses from the prior two sessions and tracks broadly negative cues out of Wall Street on Friday. Investors are repricing risk across the region as geopolitical tension compounds existing concerns about global growth and monetary policy.
And in the AI space, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is drawing attention for how he allocates his time at the top. He says roughly forty percent of his working hours go toward company culture, not model development or product launches. In a sector defined by speed and technical output, that deliberate investment in organizational health is a notable signal about how Amodei sees long-term competitive advantage being built.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
