Trump extended the US-Iran ceasefire Tuesday night, but kept the naval blockade on Iranian ports fully intact.

And Iran's response came within hours:

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seized two commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz and fired on a third.

Brent touched $100 intraday.

Day 54. No talks. No exit.

Trump said he extended the ceasefire because Iran's government is "seriously fractured."

Vance is supposed to lead talks in Islamabad.
But Tehran hasn't confirmed whether it's sending anyone.

The loop:
Tehran won't negotiate while the blockade runs.
Washington won't lift the blockade until talks produce a result.

That's a stalemate — and Trump admitting Iran is too fractured to negotiate with is also admitting the US is waiting on a power struggle it can't control.

Brent closed at $99.03.
WTI at $90.13.

With Hormuz still closed for roughly 60 days:
gasoline is up 32% since the conflict started.

March CPI printed 3.3%, up from 2.4%, with energy surging +12.5%.

Exxon, Chevron, and Occidental are collecting billions in extra free cash flow.

Airlines and consumer discretionary names are absorbing the other side of that trade.

Energy majors are riding the spike.

Gold held $4,800 this week after topping $5,595 in January — the gold bugs look prescient.

On the other side:

Airlines are bleeding jet fuel costs, and consumer discretionary estimates keep getting revised down.

There are also 1,900 seafarer assistance requests that have been filed with the International Transport Workers' Federation since the war began.

Kevin Warsh testified for the Fed chair job yesterday with all of this as backdrop.

Good luck threading the needle on "AI will keep inflation down" while gasoline rips higher every week.

The Fed meets April 28–29.

Polymarket has a 99.3% probability of no rate cut.

March CPI already printed 3.3%.
Energy is the single biggest contributor to the acceleration.

Whether a fractured Iranian government can produce a single negotiating counterpart is the one variable that determines where inflation goes next — and its completely outside the Fed's models.

And when the biggest input to your inflation outlook is the internal politics of a country under naval blockade, you're not trading macro anymore.

You're trading geopolitics. And geopolitics doesn't have a dot plot.

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HOW did Berkshire's cash pile hit $373 billion? Buffett's been a net seller for multiple consecutive quarters now. He's not saying much — but his balance sheet is.

These 15 charts tell all the industries that depend on the Strait of Hormuz. The Atlantic Council put together the war implications that go beyond oil — and it's a long list.

The Supreme Court said Trump's tariffs were illegal. Now The U.S. government owes BILLIONS back, and over 330,000 importers are already in line for refund claims.

Apple named John Ternus as its next CEO on Sunday.

He takes over on September 1, while Tim Cook slides into executive chairman.
The board approved it unanimously.

No drama, no surprise shortlist, no search firm.
Just a 25-year hardware engineer getting the keys to a $3.4 trillion company.

Jeff Williams. Chief Operating Officer.

The guy most people outside Cupertino assumed would be next.

Williams runs ops, services, health, and the Apple Watch — the resume of someone who keeps the machine humming.

He stepped back from operational duties last July, and that was probably the moment this was decided.

They picked the product guy instead.

Ternus has been at Apple since 2001.
He ran hardware engineering starting in 2021.

His fingerprints are on every generation of iPad, the iPhone 17 lineup, AirPods, the Mac's transition to Apple silicon, and the Vision Pro.

For 14 years, the knock on Cook's Apple was that it became a services company in an iPhone costume.

App Store fees, iCloud, Apple TV+, Apple Pay, ads.

Wall Street loved it — higher margins, recurring revenue, multiple expansion.

A Williams CEO would have doubled down on that playbook.

A Ternus CEO says the next big thing at Apple is a thing. A product.
Something new you hold, wear, or look through.

The foldable iPhone is rumored for 2026 or 2027.
The car project died but the robotics work didn't.

Whatever Apple Intelligence becomes needs new silicon.
That's all Ternus territory.

CEO succession is the cleanest signal a board can send about where capital goes for the next decade.

Microsoft hired Nadella in 2014 and the message was cloud.
MSFT went from $380 billion to $3 trillion-plus.

Apple just hired a hardware engineer.
The message is new product categories.

That's a different bet than milking another 2% of ARPU out of iPhone subscribers.

Whether it pays off depends on what Ternus actually ships.

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On April 17, Greenland's government approved the transfer of the remaining 50.5% of the Tanbreez rare earths project to Critical Metals Corp (CRML).

That brings the company’s ownership to 92.5% of one of the largest undeveloped heavy rare earth deposits outside China.

The stock jumped 23.6% pre-market.
Market cap hit $1.4 billion.

And the pilot plant hasn't even started yet.

When Trump kept bringing up Greenland in 2024 and 2025, most coverage treated it like a vanity fixation.

It wasn't.

Heavy rare earths — dysprosium, terbium, yttrium — are the elements that keep permanent magnets functional at high heat.

That matters for F-35 engines, Tomahawk guidance systems, Patriot missiles, every EV motor, every wind turbine generator.

It ALSO matters for AI.

That’s because AI runs on electricity, magnets, copper, and cooling — and every link in that physical chain needs rare earths.

The US imports roughly 80% of these refined products from China.

And Tanbreez is one of the few deposits on the planet that can actually supply this at scale outside Chinese control.

The Trump administration discussed taking a direct stake in CRML last year.

The $120 million EXIM Bank letter of intent is already in place.
The Greenlandic government just cleared the final ownership hurdle in under two years of political pressure.

None of that came from nowhere.

So, here’s what’s planned:

Initial target: 85,000 tonnes of rare earth oxides per year, scalable to 425,000 tonnes — roughly 50% of the heavy rare earths market outside China.

Pilot plant starts May. Bulk sampling in June.

Who sells the physical stuff that lets the digital stuff exist?

Power, transmission, rare earths, uranium, copper, cooling, industrial transformers. Almost none of it is priced at Nvidia multiples.

Most of it was ignored for 30 years.

GE Vernova, Eaton, Quanta Services, Cameco, Vertiv — they're re-rating because the data center buildout literally can't happen without them.

When a 2029 earnings call starts with "our AI capacity was constrained by transformer availability…”

The investors who remembered that real-world things need real-world inputs will have been early.

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(by feargreedmeter)

Source: Stock Analysis