Levels as of Friday 1 May US close (latest available; cash markets shut over the weekend). Sourced from Bloomberg Europe homepage; cross-checked against Reuters, CNBC, FXStreet.
| Instrument | Last | Change |
|---|---|---|
| S&P 500 (cash) | 7,230.12 | +0.29% · 6th wkly gain |
| Nasdaq Composite | 25,114.44 | +0.89% · record |
| Dow Jones Industrial | 49,499.27 | −0.31% |
| FTSE 100 | ~10,180 | pared losses, thin holiday tape |
| Stoxx 600 / DAX | closed Fri | May Day holiday — reopen Mon |
| US 10y Treasury | ~4.40% | below 4.45% post-FOMC |
| EUR/USD | ~1.176 | touched high 1.1767 |
| GBP/USD | ~1.34 | range-bound |
| Brent crude | ~$108.9 | eased on Iran-talks softening |
| WTI crude | ~$106 | 2nd weekly gain risked |
| Gold | near record | geopolitical bid intact |
The Iran war is now the controlling variable for both crude and US foreign-policy posture, and the weekend tilted the signal back towards risk-on for oil and risk-off for diplomacy. The IRGC's "fully prepared" warning, Trump's rejection of Tehran's latest offer, and his "treasonous to say we aren't winning" remark all sit in tension with the still-technical 8 April ceasefire. The supertanker crossing of Hormuz is a small positive operational data point but does not change the strategic picture: the US blockade of Iranian ports remains, ~2,000 ships are still stranded, and supertanker premiums for Gulf transit stay extreme. Brent has eased back into the high $100s but the supply-chain plumbing remains broken.
The European theatre delivered three substantive moves in 48 hours: the 5,000-troop Germany drawdown is now formal; the open question over Italy and Spain is live; and the 25% auto-tariff threat is the single most expensive piece of news for European industrial earnings since the war began. For Berlin and Brussels the security-autonomy debate has accelerated — the defence-equity bid is already pricing it. Watch German political signalling on rearmament timelines and the EU Council response to the auto threat over the next 72 hours.
The April FOMC held with three dissents. This past week, three of the dissenting officials publicly tied their position to rising uncertainty — softer growth on one side, energy- and tariff-driven inflation on the other. Bond traders are now hedging both cuts and hikes, which is unusual and maps onto a steeper long end. The 10y has settled in a 4.40–4.45% range; the 2s10s curve has restepended. The Bank of England's sole dissenter publicly pushed for quick rate hikes; the ECB's Makhlouf flagged that upside inflation risks have intensified. The global central-bank reaction function is rotating hawkish at the margin even as growth wobbles.
Powell's chairmanship is widely expected to end in May; Kevin Warsh remains the consensus successor. The political optics of any cut into a tariff-and-energy-driven inflation impulse get materially harder. Diary: ADP Wednesday, ISM Services Tuesday, ECB minutes mid-week, US Nonfarm Payrolls (April) Friday — the single-largest data risk of the week.
Apple is the through-line into Monday. Beat-and-raise on services, the Mac Mini price hike to $799, and Cook's explicit memory-cost commentary keep the AI-hardware bottleneck story very much alive. The Mac Mini bump is the cleanest single data point of the week — when Apple, of all companies, passes through DRAM cost into a flagship consumer SKU, the squeeze is real and persistent. Hyperscaler capex remains the demand sink; Meta's $19.84bn Q1 capex and the Bloomberg reporting on AI-fuelled big-tech borrowing are the other side of the same trade.
Around the edges: eBay rallied on a report that GameStop is preparing a takeover bid; Anthropic's Mythos drew Fed Governor Bowman into commentary on the dynamic nature of AI tools; OpenAI's CFO talked about a "vertical wall of demand"; and the Musk-vs-OpenAI trial had a difficult first week for Musk's side. Cerebras is reportedly targeting up to a $4bn IPO. The IPO window is open in selective AI-infrastructure names, and Meta acquired a robotics-AI company over the weekend to build out its humanoid effort.
Two threads relevant to a clinician. First, J&J's ketamine derivative Spravato is now a $1.7bn franchise per Bloomberg — a meaningful proof-point for the broader interventional-psychiatry pipeline (Seaport's debut on Friday rallied 10% on the same theme). Second, Moderna's CEO commented on flu shots and skin-cancer trial progress; the mRNA platform's oncology read-throughs remain one of the more interesting clinical stories of 2026. Tangential but interesting: BMO is using AI and quantum computing to predict earthquakes, a small case study in domain-specific AI deployment beyond LLMs. Bloomberg Businessweek's piece on ABA-therapy commercialisation is also worth a look from a clinical-ethics angle.