Though markets may appreciate the prospect of peace, the lack of resolution about a critical economic choke point may be troubling.
On the agenda this morning:
💼 Labor market data vs. anecdotes
🎗️ The stock market has trust issues right now
🥵 Anthropic has an oopsie
🏦 The Fed is spelling it out clearly
🤖 One huge number
🔎 Google search runs our lives
📆 What we’re watching Thursday: Markets will be digesting President Trump’s address and the Iran situation as a light day on the calendar features Challenger’s job cuts, exports, and jobless claims.
🛢️ Bank of America rips up economic forecasts, calls for “mild stagflation,” and braces for $100 oil all year. Even if the war ends within weeks.
Oracle headquarters in Redwood City, Calif. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
Oracle is reportedly slashing thousands of jobs as it searches for ways to pay for its AI spending. LinkedIn posts and reports from CNBC and BBC have pegged the number at potentially 10,000.
We’ve seen this a bunch so far this year, with Meta, UPS, and Amazon as prime examples.
But so far, we haven’t seen the overall data reflect the trend that these splashy anecdotes with big numbers and bigger names chart. ADP’s private payroll data, out Wednesday, showed 62,000 new roles added in March, more than the 40,000 economists had anticipated.
The plane is not falling out of the air by any means.
Still, the numbers out of these rich megacaps may be the tip of the spear, so to speak, and we, like the Fed, are constantly looking to refresh the data pages.
Challenger’s job cuts are out today. And March’s jobs report tomorrow.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks to members of the media during a press briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, Tuesday, March 31, 2026. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
In normal times it’s hard to know who to believe. The stock market tends to go up in the long run, but its gyrations and rhythms on shorter time scales are a mystery, even to the podcasters and YouTubing chart analysts who say otherwise.
Wartime complicates everything, and the ripples of expensive oil mean that every headline has the power to whipsaw the market.
An eager market has proven itself primed to turn on every new detail from the White House, even as investors and analysts remain skeptical of what President Trump says and the administration’s timelines for a conclusion.
Even people outside the finance world are familiar with the TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) trade, where Trump boldly proclaims something only to back down. (Though it sounds pejorative, the phrase has been co-opted by apolitical Wall Street analysts as a trading framework.) The market has tried to get ahead of all of that by pricing in the president’s anticipated reversal.
But in the Iran war, Tehran has a vote too.
This is perhaps one of the strangest things in the current environment: A key source of market-moving information — Iran itself — is also the US’s adversary. It takes two to tango, and two to open the Strait of Hormuz. Thanks to social media, we can now read their metaphorical newspaper from here, propaganda or fact, to get a sense of their willingness to do so.
On Wednesday, the Iranian president even published a message to the American people, defending its position directly.
Recently, Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Ghalibaf, has been getting in on the stock action, using his X account to dole out investment advice and counter Washington’s efforts to steer market sentiment. It’s a new kind of geopolitical trolling and social media warfare that’s also inflected with finance influencer lingo.
Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger unveiling Claude 4 during the Code with Claude conference, Thursday, May 22, 2025, in San Francisco. (Don Feria/AP Content Services for Anthropic) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
If an AI company inadvertently shares its model’s source code, does that still count as open source?
Anthropic accidentally released about 1,900 files and 512,000 lines of code tied to its Claude coding assistant.
“A Claude Code release included some internal source code. No sensitive customer data or credentials were involved or exposed,” Anthropic said in a statement earlier this week. “This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach.”
The screw-up is notable because it could undermine Anthropic’s public image as an AI lab focused on safety. And it arrives just as the company is battling the federal government in court, over the Pentagon labeling Anthropic as a supply chain risk.
The potential AI leader is actively fighting that designation and won an early court victory last month, temporarily blocking the Pentagon from labeling it a national security risk, though its business is still in jeopardy.
OpenAI just pulled in a historic bag in a fundraising round, securing $122 billion in commitments.
Of course, with its famously high cash burn, the company needs it.
That number now means OpenAI is valued at $852 billion, a mind-boggling figure for a private company, but one that is commensurate with its plans to, as it wrote, build a “unified AI superapp.”
This is a big win for Sam Altman and the OpenAI team, a day after they performed very poorly in our AI exec power rankings.
As DA Davidson’s Gil Luria noted, “at a more skeptical time we talked about OpenAI’s grand ‘fake it ’till you make it’ [ethos]. Well, they made it.”
“It might be tempting to always ‘look through’ the effects of negative supply shocks on inflation and to focus on their impacts on labor markets and growth. History suggests caution is warranted.”
— St. Louis Fed president Alberto Musalem, speaking at the AEI in Washington, D.C.
The Fed presidents are spelling it out clearly for all to see.
The past few days have seen multiple officials echo the sentiment that the Fed — and thus, investors — shouldn’t look past the oil crisis as a typical negative supply shock.
This time, Musalem said, the already-high inflation makes it different.
There’s just under a month until the next Fed meeting. But as we have just learned (yet again), a lot can happen in four weeks.
LordRunar via Getty Images
In a local politics squabble straight out of “Parks and Recreation,” residents of Manassas, Va., are fighting over the name of their newly expanded airport.
At the center of the dispute? Google search results.
Located about an hour southwest of Washington, D.C., the Manassas Regional Airport is expected to offer commercial flights in early 2027. But to attract airlines and passengers, city leaders and the private airport operator want to rebrand the airport to have “Washington” in the name, despite the distance.
Residents are upset, local WTOP reported. But as Manassas Vice Mayor Mark Wolfe explained, the airport’s success and growth depend on SEO.
“When businesses and people search for a place to land, their services are predicated on Washington, not Manassas,” Wolfe told WTOP. “When you go to Google Flights and you’re flying to Washington, D.C., that ‘Washington-Manassas’ will populate right up there with Dulles and National airports.”
Of course, those looking to see the nation’s capital may see this as false advertising when they look up just how far they are from the Lincoln Memorial.
Economic data: Change in nonfarm payrolls, March (50,000 expected, -92,000 previously); Change in private payrolls, March (+55,000 expected, -86,000 previously); Change in manufacturing payrolls, March (-12,000 previously); Average hourly earnings, month-on-month, March (+0.3% expected, +0.4% previously); Average hourly earnings, year-on-year, March (+3.8% expected, +3.8% previously); Unemployment rate, March (+4.4% expected, +4.4% previously); Labor force participation rate, March (62.1% expected, 62% previously); S&P Global US services PMI, March final reading (51.1 previously); S&P Global US composite PMI, March final reading (51.4 previously)
