Welcome to Markets Desk, here's what's moving the tape this afternoon.
Crude oil took a meaningful step back Thursday, with September WTI settling down more than two percent as Persian Gulf tensions showed signs of easing. No new military strikes overnight between the US and Iran gave traders room to exhale, and that relief came straight off the barrel price.
Shifting to trade policy, a federal court has upheld the Trump administration's closure of the so-called de minimis loophole, the provision that had allowed low-value packages, primarily from Chinese e-commerce platforms, to enter the country duty-free. The ruling is a significant win for domestic retailers who argued the exemption created an uneven playing field, and it tightens the screws further on cross-border commerce with China.
And in the IPO pipeline, Anthropic is generating serious buzz, with some investors reportedly eyeing a valuation somewhere between two trillion and three trillion dollars ahead of a potential public offering. That would shatter SpaceX's record-setting one point seven trillion dollar milestone. Whether the market has the appetite for that kind of number is the real question, and it won't be a small one to answer.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
