The Open Bell

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...