Welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on the stories moving money and markets.
The dollar is climbing today as geopolitical risk re-enters the picture. A Houthi attack on an oil tanker sent crude surging more than five percent, lifting the dollar index by nearly four-tenths of a percent. Ten-year Treasury yields hit a fresh one-and-a-half-year high, reinforcing the rate differential that has kept the dollar bid against its peers.
Shifting to earnings, Alphabet just posted its most profitable quarter in company history, booking one hundred twelve billion dollars in profit. But Wall Street isn't celebrating. Sixty-nine percent of that figure came from unrealized paper gains on stakes in SpaceX and Anthropic, not the core advertising business. Strip that out, and the picture is far less impressive, which is exactly what investors did.
And on trade policy, President Trump is threatening a fifty percent tariff on a broad range of Canadian goods currently shielded under his own two thousand twenty trade deal. The announcement carries a thirty-day fuse and has drawn sharp backlash, raising fresh questions about the durability of North American trade frameworks and what renegotiation might actually look like.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
