The Open Bell

Today on The Open Bell: Oil crossed $100 a barrel overnight because Houthi rebels in Yemen set fire to a Saudi tanker in the Red Sea, and if you're wondering what that has to do with your petrol bill, the answer is: quite a lot, quite soon. Alphabet beat its revenue forecast and still got punished by markets, because it told investors it plans to spend $205 billion on AI this year and Wall St...

Today on The Open Bell: Iran nuclear talks have collapsed, the U.S. is on its eleventh straight night of strikes on Iranian military facilities, and for the first time since this conflict started, two of the world's biggest oil shipping routes are under threat simultaneously, with Brent crude already above $95 and Goldman Sachs calling $120 the base case if neither lane reopens. Alphabet just...

Today on The Open Bell: Trump just hit Canada with 50% tariffs using a law that hasn't been touched since Herbert Hoover was in the White House and the Great Depression was still getting started, and if that doesn't tell you how far outside normal territory we've moved, nothing will. Britain's bond market, which had been pricing in a rough ride under the new Burnham government,...

Today on The Open Bell: Nine consecutive nights of US strikes on Iranian targets have pushed oil back above $90 a barrel, and if you think that's a story about geopolitics and not about your petrol bill or your mortgage, today's episode will change your mind. US 30-year mortgage rates just hit their highest point in nearly a year, and the reason ties directly back to that same conflict,...

Today on The Open Bell: The US and Iran escalated over the weekend in ways that will show up at your petrol pump this week, with Brent crude clearing $90 a barrel after strikes hit vessels near the Strait of Hormuz and took out a Kuwaiti oil processing facility, and the uncomfortable truth is that every tick higher in oil makes it harder for central banks to cut rates the way everyone was hoping....

Today on The Open Bell: TSMC, the Taiwanese company that makes the chips inside almost everything AI runs on, just reported its best earnings in years and its stock still fell more than 4%, which tells you the AI trade isn't about fundamentals anymore, it's about whether the next number can keep topping the last one. SpaceX dropped below its $135 IPO price this week, just one month after...

Today on The Open Bell: The US struck Iranian targets overnight for the second time in as many days, oil is back above $80 a barrel, and the risk that the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel that handles about a fifth of the world's seaborne oil, gets seriously disrupted is no longer a tail risk anyone's dismissing. Apple got regulatory approval from Beijing to switch on its AI features...

Today on The Open Bell: Trump has reimposed a naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel that carries a fifth of the world's seaborne oil, and slapped a 20% toll on everything that moves through it, and Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, jumped nearly 10% overnight to $83 a barrel, which means this isn't a market story, it's a petrol pump story. New Fed chair Kev...

Today on The Open Bell: U.S. forces struck Iranian targets overnight and Brent crude is back above $79 a barrel, which means the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel that carries roughly a quarter of the world's oil, is doing what it always does when tensions flare: making everyone's petrol bill a geopolitical problem. A 300-page housing affordability bill just became U.S. law, and burie...

Today on The Open Bell: Trump stood at a NATO summit in Ankara and declared the US-Iran ceasefire finished, and oil prices jumped more than five percent within hours, which tells you everything about how fragile the assumption of calm in that region actually was. A South Korean chipmaker called SK Hynix just raised $26.5 billion on the Nasdaq, the biggest US listing by a foreign company ever, and...

Today on The Open Bell: SK Hynix just pulled off one of the biggest US stock market debuts in history, and the fact that investors threw seven times more money at it than was available tells you everything about how desperate Wall Street is to own a piece of the AI memory trade right now. The US government is now paying its highest borrowing cost in roughly twenty years on long-term debt, and that...

Today on The Open Bell: Trump just torched the Iran ceasefire deal and the U.S. bombed over 80 Iranian targets overnight, and the immediate consequence is sitting right there on the petrol station forecourt: oil up more than 5% in a single day. The Federal Reserve's own internal minutes show that roughly half its members are open to raising interest rates again this year, and if you've g...

Today on The Open Bell: The US struck more than 80 Iranian targets and revoked Iran's oil export waivers on the same day, and if you think that's just a geopolitics story, check your petrol app in a fortnight. Samsung just posted the biggest profit in its history and its stock fell 10%, which tells you everything you need to know about how markets price expectations versus reality right...

Today on The Open Bell: SpaceX joined the Nasdaq-100 this morning, which means the index funds sitting in millions of retirement accounts had no choice but to buy $4.3 billion worth of Elon Musk's rocket company, because that's just how passive investing works. OPEC+ has now hiked oil output three months in a row, WTI crude is below $68.65 a barrel, and if you're filling up this wee...

Today on The Open Bell: US markets reopen after the long weekend and Nasdaq futures are already up nearly a percent, but the real story is what's inside the index now, because SpaceX just got added to the Nasdaq-100 and if you hold one of those index funds in your pension or retirement account, you're a SpaceX investor as of this morning whether you chose to be or not. Oil has dropped cl...

Today on The Open Bell: Meta just announced it has so much AI computing power sitting around that it's going to start selling the surplus to other companies, and the knock-on effect was a full-blown wipeout across the semiconductor sector, because the entire bull case for AI chips was built on the idea that there'd never be enough of them. South Korea's stock market fell nearly 8% i...

Today on The Open Bell: The Strait of Hormuz is half-blocked, LNG infrastructure is damaged, and the IEA is using words like "greatest threat to global energy security in history," which means the price of getting to work, heating your home, and flying anywhere this summer isn't coming down anytime soon. The US added just 57,000 jobs in June, roughly half of what forecasters expecte...

Today on The Open Bell: Meta has spent years hoarding AI chips, and it's bought so many that it's now turning itself into a cloud computing business to lease the excess out, which apparently came as enough of a shock to markets that it knocked more than 10% off several chipmakers in a single day. UK energy bills jumped 13% on July 1, the biggest quarterly increase since the 2022 crisis,...

Today on The Open Bell: Oil just posted its worst quarter since the pandemic, down 38% in three months, and the story isn't just cheap petrol: it's that a collapse this big reshapes everything from Saudi Arabia's government budget to how hard the Fed has to fight inflation. The Fed's own internal forecasts spooked markets badly enough last week that traders now price a one-in-t...

Today on The Open Bell: The US and Iran agreed to stop shooting at each other across the Strait of Hormuz, and oil markets dropped so fast you'd think someone had flipped a switch, which is exactly what happened. The Dow Jones, the 30-stock index that's been tracking American business since 1896, crossed 52,000 for the first time in its history, and the uncomfortable truth is that Google...

Today on The Open Bell: Venezuela's earthquake death toll has passed 1,450, the country's worst in over a century, and the fact that U.S. Marines are now surveying its main port tells you something important about who actually has leverage in a disaster — even one involving a government Washington has spent years trying to isolate. The European Central Bank hiked rates just weeks ago for...

Today on The Open Bell: Iran announced the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow channel that carries roughly a fifth of the world's oil — was closed, on the exact same day the US quietly granted Iran permission to sell more of that oil, which tells you everything you need to know about how well these Switzerland talks are actually going. SpaceX pulled off the biggest stock market debut in years, poc...

Today on The Open Bell: Brent is still above $100 and the ceasefire holding the Strait of Hormuz together is contested enough that calling it a ceasefire feels generous — this is the biggest oil supply shock in recorded history, and it isn't over. Kevin Warsh chaired his first FOMC meeting and walked out threatening rate hikes, not cuts — and the bond market's reaction was the loudest it...

Today on The Open Bell: American consumers spent nearly twice what forecasters expected in May, which sounds like great news until you ask whether they're actually better off or just paying more for the same stuff. China has just published a five-year plan to lock down global critical minerals, and Europe is already reaching for import quotas — the materials trade war that's been simmeri...

Here's something nobody tells you: the global economy doesn't ask permission before it rearranges your life. Interest rates, oil prices, currency moves, trade deals — these aren't abstractions happening to someone else. They're why your mortgage payment went up. They're why your weekly shop costs more than it did two years ago. And they're why your pension is doing wh...