Wednesday, 13 May 2026

Top of the morning

• Beijing eve: Trump–Xi opens tomorrow as ceasefire posture hardens and oil stays bid

  Air Force One lifts for Beijing this evening into a backdrop the White House did not script. Trump publicly rejected Iran's latest peace offer as "totally unacceptable" overnight and said the ceasefire is "on massive life support", while the Wall Street Journal reports Tehran has come back with a fresh proposal on uranium enrichment. The summit programme is unchanged — Thursday welcome ceremony, bilateral, state banquet, Friday working lunch — and Trump told reporters he intends to raise Taiwan arms sales with Xi, a deliberate escalation of the agenda. Beijing's read is that the Iran file forces Chinese purchases of Iranian crude into the centre of the conversation; the Ford–CATL battery JV is the goodwill anchor, Nvidia's CEO skipping the trip the visible counterweight. Crude sits at $99.20 on the Bloomberg tape and the equity tape is treating tomorrow as binary: any explicit commitment on Iranian-crude purchases reads as supply-positive, silence confirms the harder line.
• Aramco's Nasser flips the framing: Hormuz fuel stocks "critically low"

  The single most important shift of the past 24 hours is from Amin Nasser, who said gasoline and jet-fuel inventories are "rapidly accelerating" toward critically low levels because of the Hormuz disruption — now in week eleven. This is a different statement from his earlier "100 million-barrel cumulative loss" line and from the term-structure shift it implied. "Critically low" is product-side, not crude-side; it speaks directly to refinery throughput, jet-fuel basis and the upcoming summer driving season in Europe and the US. Europe's oil majors have separately reaped up to $4.75bn trading the Iran-war volatility per the FT, and Morgan Stanley said the oil market is in a "race against time" on Hormuz. The FT's chart-package note that AI mania has masked a $5.4tn aggregate hit from the Iran war (with semiconductors carrying most of the offset) is the macro picture: the index can hold near records while the refining-and-airlines complex cracks.
• UK: Starmer's "last-ditch" cabinet bid as Labour mood turns "pretty ugly"

  The FT framed it as a "last-ditch bid" overnight; Bloomberg has Starmer "losing the fight to stay in power as rebellion spreads." Today's cabinet meeting is the live event — Mahmood, Burnham, Streeting, Rayner all named as the parliamentary alternatives, with Burnham retaining the strongest internal MP backing per Bloomberg's read. Gilts dropped on the calls for Starmer to step down and sterling held at 1.36 on the live tape, suggesting the market is still treating the transition as multi-week rather than same-week. Catherine West's pivot from a Monday-deadline challenge to a September timetable supports that read. Robert Shrimsley's column ("nothing here to save Starmer") and Stephen Bush's ("no Labour revival if Starmer remains") in the FT mark the editorial line tilting. Reform under Farage is closing in, per the Bloomberg "once ridiculed" piece. Today's UK March industrial-production data lands into this.
• Korea AI-tax overhang continues; Goldman flags the "super surplus" framing

  Samsung sits at 279,000 KRW after Monday's 2.28% slide on the citizen-dividend floater. Goldman has now formalised the analytical frame: an "AI-driven super surplus" accruing to Korea and Taiwan as the upstream beneficiaries of the global capex wave, with the inference that the policy template is portable. Bloomberg's overnight piece notes the policymaker walk-back was partial at best and that the windfall-tax option remains on the cabinet table. For Luca's equity exposure the practical takeaway hasn't changed since yesterday: the AI-leadership thesis depends increasingly on whether governments tax the rent, not just on demand and unit economics. Trump's "fake news" enforcer Bloomberg Businessweek read is the parallel signal on US policy posture toward the platform layer. The cleanest single-name expression of the broader doubt is Chris Hohn's TCI cutting $8bn off its Microsoft stake citing AI software disruption — a respected long-only hand reframing the upside case.
• Asia overnight: BOJ-hike rhetoric digested, Japan households still cutting

  The Bank of Japan's June-hike signal is now in the price; the JGB 10-year auction's stronger-than-12-month-average demand confirmed domestic real money is comfortable adding duration into the move. Finance Minister Katayama said overnight she is coordinating with Treasury Secretary Bessent on FX policy en route to China — the polite shorthand for "we'd both prefer the yen not break 150 this week." Spending data showed Japanese households continuing to cut even as wages keep rising; that is the BOJ's harder problem and the structural reason the cycle stays shallow. Elsewhere in Asia: the PBOC published a warning on imported inflation while focusing on policy transmission; Shanghai opened down 0.40% on the tape; central banks tapped the most yuan swap lines with the PBOC in two years, a quiet read on global yuan-funding stress. Investors dumped Indian assets and the rupee slid as the energy shock fed through; India's foreign-investor exit hit a record per the FT.
• US setup: PPI today, fuel-tax holiday on the table, gas-tax math at $3.5bn/month

  After yesterday's CPI the macro pivot moves to US April PPI at 14:30 CET. With Hormuz now in week eleven and Aramco flagging product-side scarcity, the pipeline-price tell is the cleanest read on whether the energy passthrough is still climbing the supply chain. Around the print, Trump is publicly considering suspending the federal fuel tax — Bloomberg's calculation puts the cost at $3.5bn a month — alongside a delayed move to lower beef-import tariffs per the WSJ. The inflation politics are the story underneath: Trump is now visibly targeting beef and fuel prices, which says more about the November tape than about April. S&P 500 holds 7,412 and Nasdaq 26,274 near records; Wall Street veteran Ed Yardeni confident on S&P 8,000 per the Bloomberg piece; Burry's 2000-echo warning is the recurrent counterweight, not yet a tradeable signal.
• FX & commodities: dollar soft, gold holds $4,731, copper near record, oil's term structure still steep

  EUR/USD at 1.18 and GBP/USD at 1.36 both nudged higher on the live tape — the dollar gave a little back as the rates-desk hangover from the CPI print faded and as the Iran headlines stayed risk-off-coded. Gold sits at $4,731.60 and is holding the bid; copper steadied near record per Bloomberg ahead of the Trump rejection of Iran's plan. Front-month crude at $99.20 +1.15% with Aramco's product-side warning behind it; LNG sits in a bracket where $70 is the new "most worrying number" per the Bloomberg LNG note. The term-structure question is now the trade: spike-and-revert (refiner pain shorter, integrated pain longer) versus level-shift (everyone reprices summer-driving-season demand assumptions). Italian and Spanish equity continue to look better in relative terms within Europe; the FTSE MIB outperformance of the last fortnight is the clean expression.
• AI capex squeezing FCF to decade low — Anthropic at $1tn, Microsoft's $92bn OpenAI math, NHS-Palantir scope

  The FT's running tally of Big Tech's $725bn AI capex bill is now matched with a fresh data point: Microsoft targeted a $92bn return on its early OpenAI investment per Bloomberg's exclusive — the cleanest number yet on how the platform layer is pricing the bet. Anthropic is reportedly weighing a financing round at a valuation near $1tn on the back of revenue surge, which sets the speculative bookend. On the other side, the FT's NHS reporting that Palantir contractors will have "unlimited access" to patient data is the institutional flipside that will be cited in European DPA discussions and is directly relevant for any Italian regional health-IT procurement following the same template. Around the tape: Hudson River's $6.4bn Q1 keeps the proprietary-trading rerating intact; Jane Street's haul remains the benchmark; ServiceNow is planning a $4bn bond sale; GitLab will cut jobs to spend on growth in the "agentic era"; Anthony Scaramucci flagged Wall Street's "Trump regrets" overnight.
• Around the tape: Sony–Blackstone music rights, Spirit fees over $80m, Helsing $18bn, KNDS pre-IPO

  Sony will buy Blackstone's portfolio of music rights for close to $4bn — another leg of catalogue-as-asset. Spirit Airlines' bankruptcy adviser fees crossed $80m and counting per the FT. Helsing's drone-startup valuation may print at $18bn in its next round; KNDS is pushing Berlin to decide on a state stake before its IPO. Eon is taking over UK supplier Ovo. Stellantis' Leapmotor deal is reshaping European carmaking; European carmakers have collectively absorbed an €8bn hit from Trump tariffs. Activist Palliser built a stake in EQT-target Intertek. UK fintech Wise made its dual US trading debut. Ambani's cola war with Coke and Pepsi continues; Toyota will build a new Indian SUV plant. Petrobras missed profit estimates despite the war-driven rally — useful tell on how much of the oil move is volume vs price. Cartier-watcher: not a market line.
• Health, AI in medicine, and the clinician's weather report

  Three threads. (1) The Canary Islands hantavirus cluster moved from headline to operational: evacuation of the hantavirus-hit cruise ship began in Tenerife overnight per the FT, and the Nebraska isolation cohort holds. Clinical framing unchanged — high case fatality in severe HPS, very low person-to-person transmissibility, surveillance gap rather than pandemic mechanism — but Italian port-of-entry teaching this autumn should incorporate the differential for returning Atlantic-route passengers. (2) The Bloomberg piece on AI-enabled wearables predicting health problems before they manifest is the consumer-medical interface story; pair with the FT's Palantir-NHS contractor-access reporting as the institutional flipside. (3) On therapeutics: Novo Nordisk handed over a Parkinson's therapy to a Zuckerberg-backed startup — a venture move worth tracking for the longer-arc neurodegenerative pipeline. The Supreme Court extending abortion-pill-by-mail access keeps US clinical-access policy live; the FT's "women at the sharp end as AI takes over administrative roles" piece is the labour-side read on AI penetration in healthcare administration.

Markets snapshot — live levels at the Rome open

Levels read this morning from Bloomberg's live homepage ticker via Control Chrome. US cash equity values reflect Tuesday's close carried into pre-open; oil is intra-session; Asia values are this morning's prints where labelled.

Geopolitics & today's watch

The Iran file is the operational and political pivot of the day. Trump's overnight characterisation of Iran's offer as "totally unacceptable" and the ceasefire as on "massive life support" is the framing the summit goes in with. Underneath the rhetoric the WSJ's report that Tehran has come back with a new proposal on uranium is the substantive opening; the question is whether Beijing brings any leverage to the table on Chinese purchases of Iranian crude. The operational signals are still escalating — Iran's mini-submarine deployment in the Strait, AIS scrambling around Hormuz, and Aramco's Nasser now flagging product-side ("critically low" fuel stocks) rather than crude-side scarcity. Morgan Stanley's "race against time" framing on Hormuz is the cleanest sell-side line. US sanctions on more entities and individuals over Iran oil sales went out overnight, hardening the enforcement posture. The trade is still long Brent vol, long European refining-margin pain, and long the Italian/Spanish equity relative call.

The UK is the cleanest live political event in the European session. Starmer's "last-ditch" cabinet bid today is the make-or-break moment; the FT and Bloomberg both describe the Labour Party mood as "pretty ugly." Mahmood's privately-advocated orderly transition, the four resigning aides last weekend, the seventy-five-plus MPs demanding a timetable, and Catherine West's pivot to a September parliamentary canvas all point to a transition measured in weeks rather than days — which is itself why sterling held 1.36 and gilts only softened modestly. Burnham remains the favourite per Bloomberg's MP backing read; Streeting and Rayner are the dark horses; Mahmood is now visible enough to be a candidate in her own right. Martin Wolf's Tuesday FT column on protecting Britain "against the tyranny of the minority" is the elite-consensus line on what a Reform government would mean.

Three adjacent threads. First, Trump claimed Russia and Ukraine agreed a 3-day ceasefire and prisoner swap; operational verification is thin and Zelenskyy's former chief of staff has been formally accused of money laundering in a major corruption probe — a parallel signal that Kyiv's domestic-governance file is now in motion. Second, Germany is moving to buy Tomahawks from Washington despite the Merz–Trump fall-out, with the defence minister flying out this week per the FT; European defence procurement remains the cleanest structural buy in the equity complex, and Helsing's $18bn-round print is the venture echo. Third, South Africa: Ramaphosa publicly said overnight he will not resign and will fight the impeachment process — Bloomberg's Justice Malala column reads his political days as numbered regardless. EU politics: the FT-Bloomberg parallel reads on Ursula von der Leyen being increasingly seen as "too powerful" by member states is a slow-burn dynamic to track into the autumn.

Central banks & the rate-cut narrative

Today's US April PPI is the macro pivot. The pipeline-price tell matters more than usual: with Hormuz in week eleven and Aramco flagging product-side scarcity, the question is whether the energy passthrough has finished climbing or is still moving up the supply chain. Around the print, the Senate procedural votes on Kevin Warsh's Fed-chair nomination have cleared the first hurdle and the next confirmation step is in motion this week; Powell's term expires Friday. Goolsbee continues to say all options are on the table; the BLS schedule for the rest of May is the relevant secondary calendar. The September-cut conversation is alive again after yesterday's CPI; the cleanest expression in the curve is the front-end stillness with a long-end steepening bias on fiscal headlines (the Trump fuel-tax holiday and beef-import-tariff moves are the new fiscal-loosening tells).

Europe is mirroring the US picture but cleaner. Money markets still price better than 75% odds of an 11 June ECB hike with more than 50bp of tightening through year-end; Lagarde's "torn between too early and too late" framing remains the candid version. The PBOC's overnight warning on imported inflation is the polite acknowledgement that everyone is digesting the same energy passthrough, but Beijing is keeping its rate-cut option open through the Trump–Xi window. The BOJ's June-hike signal is now in the price; the JGB demand confirms domestic positioning. Ignazio Angeloni's FT column on whether the ECB will shift tack on the digital euro is worth reading; the BoE's supply-shock framing post-Megan-Greene continues to do the analytical work for sterling. Italy's Q1 GDP final print today is the European data event.

Big Tech, AI & corporates

The composition story is now clearer than the level story. Bloomberg's Markets Daily piece reads investors cheering as Alphabet goes from "AI zero to hero"; the FT's chart pack puts the semiconductor sector as the carrier of most of the $5.4tn aggregate gain since the Iran war began. Microsoft's targeted $92bn return on its early OpenAI investment is the cleanest number yet on the platform layer's economics, while OpenAI's trial — the Musk lawsuit heads into its final week, with Altman due to testify and Nadella having already called the boardroom attempt to remove Altman "amateur city" — keeps the governance overhang live. Chris Hohn's TCI cutting $8bn off its Microsoft stake citing AI software-disruption risk is the most respected long-only hand reframing the upside case. Anthropic's reported $1tn-valuation conversation lands as the speculative bookend; Burry's 2000-echo warning is the recurrent counterweight, not yet a tradeable signal. Around the deal tape: Sony–Blackstone music rights (~$4bn), ServiceNow $4bn bond sale, GitLab cutting jobs to spend on "agentic era" growth, KKR's $300m injection into a struggling private credit fund, Cisco prints after the bell as the read on enterprise networking demand.

EM and the rest of the tape: India's foreign-investor exit hit a record per the FT, the rupee weakened on the energy shock; Toyota will build a new Indian SUV plant; the FT's "factory workers abandon jobs as city life gets too expensive" piece is the labour-side echo of the same fuel-price story. Aramco missed profit estimates despite the war-driven oil rally — useful tell on how much of the oil move is volume vs price. UK fintech Wise made its dual US trading debut; Activist Palliser built a stake in EQT-target Intertek. Citigroup hired senior bankers in infrastructure and South Africa from JPMorgan. Macquarie's commodities boss was paid more than its CEO as profits soared. ByteDance, Alibaba, Boeing and Ford-CATL are the names to watch through the Beijing summit window; the Bloomberg "Big Take" on Boeing's bet on Trump and China is the strategic read.

Health & science (worth a glance)

The Canary Islands hantavirus cluster shifted from headline to operational overnight: evacuation of the cruise ship began in Tenerife per the FT, the Nebraska isolation cohort holds, and three further evacuees tested positive in the past 24 hours. Clinical framing is unchanged — high case fatality (~30–40% in severe HPS), very low person-to-person transmissibility, surveillance gap rather than pandemic mechanism — but the cross-border detection question is now the right framing for inbound-port screening protocols and for travel-medicine teaching this autumn. Italian colleagues at the airport medical posts should keep the differential live for returning Atlantic-route cruise passengers, particularly for the prodromal flu-like presentation.

Three institutional reads worth flagging. First, the FT's NHS-Palantir reporting that contractors will have "unlimited access" to patient data is a procurement-and-information-governance story that will be cited in European DPA discussions and is directly relevant for any Italian regional health-IT procurement following the same template. Second, the Bloomberg Businessweek read on AI-enabled wearables predicting health problems before they manifest is the consumer side of the same trend, with the implication that the front door for many specialist referrals will increasingly be a device alert rather than a primary-care visit; pair with the FT's "women bearing the brunt of AI displacement in administrative roles" as the labour-economics shadow within healthcare admin and revenue-cycle. Third, the Bloomberg Businessweek piece on midlife men under pressure to extend "hotspan" rather than healthspan is the consumer-medical longevity-market read; Novo Nordisk handing a Parkinson's therapy to a Zuckerberg-backed startup is the venture move worth tracking on the neurodegenerative pipeline. The Supreme Court order extending abortion-pill-by-mail access keeps US clinical-access policy live for the autumn term.

Week ahead (CET)

• TodayWed 13 May · US — April PPI 14:30 CET · UK — March industrial production · IT — Q1 GDP final · Cisco Q3 earnings after the bell · Starmer cabinet showdown · Senate Warsh confirmation watch · FT Live Digital Assets Summit (London), Energy Transition Summit (Athens), Brazil Summit (NYC) · Aramco fuel-stock follow-through
• Thu 14Trump arrives Beijing — Trump–Xi summit day one (welcome ceremony, bilateral, state banquet) · UK — Q1 flash GDP 08:00 · JP — Q1 flash GDP overnight · EU — March industrial production · US — initial jobless claims · Walmart Q1 earnings pre-market · Alibaba
• Fri 15Trump–Xi summit day two (working lunch) · Powell's Fed-chair term ends · US — May Empire manufacturing · April retail sales · April industrial production · May U-Mich preliminary 16:00
• Mon 18Eurogroup · EU — March trade balance · NY Fed services index · China — April activity data overnight
• WatchIran 30-day window for follow-up reply · Hormuz "weeks eleven and counting" · gold $4,731 level · UK leadership timetable · Korea AI-tax follow-through · Samsung 279k level · Cisco AMC read on enterprise networking
• Ahead11 June ECB (June hike >75% priced) · BOJ June meeting (hike signal live) · Fed 16–17 June (cut probability widening) · UK budget speculation · Trump–Xi commitments follow-through