On Monday, Brent crude settled at $71.99. WTI closed at $68.55.
Both back to where they were in late February, before the war started.

Four months of conflict. A 35% spike. Gas at $4.50 a gallon.
All of it unwound in three weeks once the interim peace deal reopened the Strait of Hormuz.

OPEC+ (the cartel of oil-producing nations that coordinates global supply) saw the drop and leaned into it. They announced a fifth consecutive monthly production increase: 188,000 barrels per day starting in August.

Saudi Arabia cut its official selling price to Asia by the most since 2003.

The word on Monday was "glut."

Tuesday, Iran attacked three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. responded with airstrikes on southern Iran.

The Treasury revoked the license that had allowed global purchases of Iranian crude. Oil settled up 3% by close.

Wednesday morning, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait.

Brent jumped another 3.2%, to $76.54.

Monday's thesis was oversupply.

Saudi Arabia slashing prices. OPEC+ flooding the market.
Hormuz exports recovering. Analysts projecting a glut.

Wednesday's thesis is the opposite.

U.S. sanctions back on Iranian crude. Tankers getting hit in the strait.
A "fragile truce" that no longer looks like a truce.

The market repriced four months of war risk in about 36 hours.

Energy traders are sitting between two stories.

If the strait stays hot, the glut thesis dies and energy stocks catch a bid again.
Tanker rates climb. Refiners benefit from widening spreads.

If the truce gets patched up, it's back to $70 oil and OPEC flooding the market.

The airlines and shippers that spent three weeks banking on cheap fuel are watching that math get shakier by the hour.

Jet fuel dropped from $4.88 a gallon in April to $2.85 by mid-June.

Now, nobody's locking in forward contracts at $2.85 anymore.

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Airlines saved HOW MUCH billions on fuel? Guess how much of that is showing up in your ticket price. Carriers call it "margin repair."

Can you guess which company just joined the Nasdaq-100? Hint: its IPO raised $75 billion at $135 a share.

What does gold do when the referee can't make up its mind? The Fed minutes drop today, and exactly 9 of 18 officials want to hike.

Trump used his magistral negotiation abilities for WHAT? Spoiler: not even that surprising.

What just happened to The Magnificent 7 in June? It's in the trillions. Those buying AI chips don’t know what to do.

What does Wall Street expects from S&P 500 earnings this quarter? Q1 beat estimates by 15 points.

The June jobs report landed with a thud.

57,000 jobs added versus 115,000 expected.

The two prior months got revised down by a combined 74,000.

May now reads 129,000. April reads 148,000.

Leisure and hospitality alone lost 61,000 positions.

The unemployment rate technically "improved" to 4.2%. But it fell because labor force participation (the share of working-age adults either employed or actively looking) dropped 0.3 points to 61.5%.

People didn't find jobs. They stopped looking.

The June dot plot (the chart where each Federal Reserve official anonymously projects where interest rates should go) told a different story entirely.

Nine officials projected at least one rate hike before year-end.
Eight projected no change. One projected a cut.
Chair Kevin Warsh didn't submit a projection at all.

The federal funds rate sits at 3.50%–3.75%.

Governor Waller said Monday that high inflation remains the chief risk. Former St. Louis Fed President Jim Bullard says core inflation is too high and the Fed may not be done tightening.

Wages, for their part, are up 3.5% year over year.

Not hot enough to justify a hike on their own.
Not cool enough to take one off the table.

The minutes from the June 16–17 FOMC meeting come out Wednesday at 2 p.m.

A committee split 9–9 on hiking into a labor market that just printed 57,000 jobs is the kind of document traders actually read line by line.

Markets currently price a 21% chance of any rate cut in 2026.
September hike odds hover around 50–55%, down from above 60% before the jobs data.

Meanwhile, gold is sitting at $4,155, up 2.3% on the week, its first weekly gain in five.

Inflation's too hot to cut. The job market's too soft to hike.
And oil just started climbing again, which makes the inflation side of that equation worse.

Short-duration cash and hard assets keep winning by default.

Not because anyone's excited about them. Because nothing else has a clear path.

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The 30-year fixed mortgage rate dropped to 6.43% for the week ending July 2. That's the biggest weekly decline since late April, after seven straight weeks stuck near 6.5%.

Nobody threw a parade. The housing market has been declared dead so many times that a six-basis-point move barely registers.

But ICE's Mortgage Monitor data shows something the headlines are missing: the generation that was supposedly locked out forever is the only one showing up.

Buyers under 28 accounted for a record 20% of all purchase rate locks in Q2 2026. Nearly 33% of first-time buyer loans went to Gen Z borrowers.

Millennials and Gen X, meanwhile, are largely sitting out.

They locked in sub-4% rates during the pandemic and refinancing wave.
Moving means giving up a 3.2% mortgage for a 6.4% one.

The math doesn't work, so they don't move.

That's the golden handcuff effect. And it's freezing the move-up market solid.

The only segment with real activity is entry-level. D.R. Horton and LGI Homes are selling starter inventory to the one demographic that has no old rate to protect.

Gen Z doesn't have a sub-4% mortgage to give up. 6.4% is just the price.

They're not waiting for a rate environment that may never come back, especially if the Fed's next move is a hike.

Single-family rental Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs, companies that own rental properties and trade like stocks) built their growth story on a captive audience of young renters who "couldn't buy."

That audience is starting to leak.

The generation that headlines said would never own property is the only one writing offers. Everyone else is waiting for rates that look increasingly like a memory.

If the buyers who moved in Q2 are right, they won't look early.

They'll look like the only ones who read the room.

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Source: Stock Analysis