Good morning, you're listening to Markets Desk.
The Strait of Hormuz remains the dominant macro risk story this weekend. Despite Iran declaring the waterway closed amid escalating tit-for-tat strikes with the United States, the Joint Maritime Information Center confirmed Sunday that the southern route along the Omani coastline remains open to shipping. Threat levels are still rated severe, and traders watching crude will note that Tehran appears to be betting Washington blinks before the economic pressure of a genuine closure lands on global oil supply chains.
Shifting to earnings, all eyes on Wall Street turn to Friday when five major American banks report on the same day. Citigroup is the name drawing the most scrutiny. The bank is expected to show the strongest year-over-year improvement among its large-cap peers by return-on-equity measures, though analysts are quick to point out it still trails its own internal performance targets by a meaningful margin. Jane Fraser's turnaround remains a work in progress.
And in the tech space, Elon Musk and Sam Altman are trading barbs again on X following a fresh OpenAI model release. Altman publicly suggested Musk is fixated on him, while an Apple-filed lawsuit against OpenAI adds a legal dimension that could draw regulatory attention to AI commercialization strategies heading into the back half of the year.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
