Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk, your close of business briefing on the stories moving markets today.
Oil markets are caught in a tug of war. The International Energy Agency is forecasting a supply glut next year following a U.S.-Iran deal, pushing crude lower on easing geopolitical risk. But tightness in domestic U.S. crude inventories gave West Texas Intermediate a floor, with July contracts closing nearly one percent higher after recovering from a three-and-a-half-month low.
Turning to the energy complex, natural gas took a hit, falling nearly three percent after tropical storm Arthur — the season's first named storm — threatened Gulf Coast LNG export terminals. When export capacity goes offline, domestic supply builds, and traders priced that in quickly, pulling July Nymex contracts down from a one-and-a-half-week high.
And in the AI talent wars, a significant move to report. Noam Shazeer, a Google veteran, co-lead on the Gemini project, and founder of Character dot AI, is departing for OpenAI. Shazeer was instrumental in Google's early large language model development, and his exit signals just how aggressively OpenAI is competing for the engineers who built this generation's foundational AI architecture.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
