Good afternoon and welcome to Markets Desk.
Oil markets are extending their slide for a third straight session, with Brent and West Texas Intermediate both lower after President Trump signaled that deep diplomatic talks with Iran are actively underway. The prospect of eased tensions reduces supply disruption risk, and traders are pricing that in quickly and without hesitation.
Shifting to real estate, foreign buyers purchased just forty-five point three billion dollars worth of existing American homes in the twelve months through March of this year, a drop of more than nineteen percent in dollar volume and the second-lowest transaction count since the National Association of Realtors began tracking the data in two thousand nine. Notably, a weaker dollar should have drawn overseas buyers in — the fact that it hasn't signals something deeper than currency math at work.
And in consumer tech, Apple is rolling out a leasing program called Apple Upgrade, running through the buy-now-pay-later platform Klarna. It mirrors the structure of a car lease — lower monthly payments, no path to ownership — and it arrives directly on the heels of Apple hiking hardware prices as memory costs climb. Essentially, Apple is managing affordability pressure by restructuring how customers pay rather than pulling back on price increases.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
