Good afternoon and welcome to Markets Desk.
Meta shares bounced back sharply Thursday after the company unveiled a new agentic AI coding model and hit a significant milestone on its custom chip program, easing investor concerns about runaway capital expenditure. The market read it as proof that Meta's AI spending is beginning to translate into tangible product and infrastructure gains.
Shifting to energy, crude oil reversed early gains to close nearly two percent lower as traders dialed back the geopolitical risk premium on US-Iran tensions, concluding that military escalation remains limited for now. Natural gas fell even harder, dropping over six percent to a one-and-a-half-month low after the EIA reported a weekly storage build of sixty-one billion cubic feet, running well above seasonal averages and signaling comfortable supply heading into summer.
And in a notable development for monetary policy, the Federal Reserve has appointed a former Walmart chief executive to a new task force aimed at building real-time data on consumer spending, inflation, and economic growth. The Fed has long wrestled with the lag in traditional economic indicators, and tapping private-sector retail intelligence could give policymakers a sharper, faster read on the economy between official data releases.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
