Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk, your close of business briefing on the stories moving money and markets.
The Strait of Hormuz is back at the center of global energy anxiety. President Trump has raised the prospect of imposing tolls on shipping through the strait if Iran peace talks collapse, a threat that carries serious weight for crude prices. Iran claims it has already shut the passage, and with roughly twenty percent of global oil supply transiting that chokepoint, any disruption would ripple immediately into energy markets, inflation expectations, and the Fed's already complicated calculus.
Speaking of the Fed, financial conditions tell a story that rate policy alone cannot. The central bank's incoming chair has acknowledged what markets already know — companies are raising capital with remarkable ease, tapping equity and debt markets in a torrent. Goldman Sachs now estimates IPO proceeds for two thousand twenty six will hit two hundred twenty five billion dollars, up sharply from a prior forecast of one hundred sixty billion, and that is before a potential SpaceX listing reshapes the entire picture.
And SpaceX itself made news away from any IPO timeline, agreeing to acquire Anysphere, the developer of the AI coding tool Cursor, in a deal valued at sixty billion dollars. The acquisition signals Elon Musk's ambition to embed frontier AI directly into SpaceX's engineering infrastructure, with downstream implications for how the broader aerospace and defense sector thinks about software development talent.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
