Welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on what's moving.
Crude oil surged sharply higher on Tuesday after the United States cancelled Iran's license to sell crude and launched air strikes targeting Iranian assets. Attacks on shipping in and around the Strait of Hormuz rattled supply expectations, pushing August West Texas Intermediate up nearly two and three quarters percent to close around sixty-eight dollars and fifty cents a barrel.
Turning to tech, Perplexity is quietly developing an AI coding tool codenamed Teammate, which builds software from start to finish. The product has been used internally since May and could launch publicly, putting Perplexity in direct competition with Cursor and Anthropic's Claude Code in one of the fastest-growing corners of the AI market.
And on the labor front, Microsoft is offering laid-off US employees up to thirty-nine weeks of base pay in severance following Monday's announcement of roughly four thousand eight hundred job cuts. The package mirrors terms from the company's recent voluntary retirement program and signals a structured, deliberate approach to what is one of the larger workforce reductions in recent memory.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
