Good morning, you're tuned in to Markets Desk, let's get you caught up on what's moving.
Geopolitical risk is back in the driver's seat this session. Fresh hostilities between the United States and Iran over control of the Strait of Hormuz sent oil prices sharply higher, pulling global equities into risk-off territory. With roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne crude passing through that chokepoint, any disruption there lands hard on energy markets and investor sentiment alike.
Shifting to domestic policy with real market implications, the architect of what's being called Trump Accounts, Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner, says the president wants to automatically enroll up to seventy million American children in individual investment accounts. The ambition here is significant — auto-enrollment at that scale would represent a structural shift in how ordinary Americans build long-term equity exposure from birth.
And in the technology space, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took a pointed, if measured, shot at AI model makers including Anthropic over the practice of model distillation, where newer models are trained on the outputs of more advanced ones. Nadella called out what he sees as hypocrisy, suggesting that labs relying on leading models while complaining about distillation have a data ownership problem they're not being straight about.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
