Oil climbs on Middle East tensions as U.S. stocks extend losses
PANews said U.S. equities closed lower for a second straight session, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 1.18%, the S&P 500 falling 0.58%, and the Nasdaq Composite slipping 0.32%.
Geopolitical risk escalated quickly on Tuesday. The U.S. military said it destroyed five Iranian crude transport ships after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had launched two ballistic missile attacks on U.S. vessels. Iranian media then reported an attack on tankers near Kharg Island. Iran later warned that tankers at ports in Kuwait and Bahrain could become targets and told crews to evacuate. At the same time, Houthi attacks on energy facilities in southern Saudi Arabia continued to spread, and several Saudi facilities were temporarily shut down.
WTI crude approached $94 intraday and was up more than 2% at one point. Brent crude moved close to the $100 mark and hit a multi-month high. Goldman Sachs modestly raised its oil forecast and said the Middle East conflict could last through 2027, leaving risks skewed to the upside.
That move in oil lifted inflation expectations. Money markets are now pricing the probability of a Federal Reserve rate hike this month at more than 60%. Macquarie brought forward its first-rate-hike call from December to September and said another hike could come in the first quarter of 2027. Bank of America warned that if August core PCE rises 0.24% month over month or more and the Fed still does not act, markets could start to question its anti-inflation resolve. Claudia Sahm, who introduced the Sahm Rule, said the Fed should not change policy for the White House or the election cycle, and also should not raise rates just to prove its independence; the data should decide.
Gold posts a third straight decline while copper pushes to new highs
Commodities were not moving in one direction. Spot gold fell below $4,400 and logged a third consecutive decline. Anthony Kim, Goldman Sachs’ head of metals, said the gold bull market is in a “long pause,” not over, and described the area around $4,000 as a firm floor. Goldman’s research team expects central bank buying and reserve diversification to help lift gold to $4,900 an ounce by the end of 2026.
Copper kept setting records. The most-active Shanghai copper contract traded above RMB 110,000 a ton for the first time, while three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange touched $14,624 a ton intraday. On the supply side, global copper mine output fell in the first half, and Chilean exports were disrupted by weather and mine issues. On the demand side, AI data centers, grid upgrades, and electric vehicles are reshaping copper consumption.
Citi said copper could reach $15,000 a ton before year-end, with a possible upside case of $17,000 if AI demand or a manufacturing rebound outpaces mine supply. Saxo Bank data showed the U.S. is holding close to 70% of exchange copper inventories while accounting for only about 6% to 7% of global consumption. PANews said tariff expectations in the U.S. are also pulling copper inventory toward the country.
Dollar slips against a stronger yen as the market waits for Treasury buybacks
The U.S. dollar edged lower. The dollar index fell 0.32% to 98.855, mainly because of yen strength. Dollar-yen traded around 153.4 and touched 152.89 intraday. Stronger-than-expected wage data in Japan added to the case for another Bank of Japan rate increase.
Bessent took a hard line against yen shorts, saying he understood the direction of the Bank of Japan and policymakers and adding, “Now I’m the house,” according to PANews’ summary. He said he was not concerned about traders betting the other way.
Morgan Stanley said carry trades can still absorb yen strength for now. Unless another catalyst pushes up broad market volatility, the bank does not think the recent yen rebound will necessarily derail emerging-market carry trades across the board.
In rates, the sell-off in long-dated sovereign bonds has not ended. The U.S. 10-year Treasury yield was holding near 4.8%, while the 30-year yield remained around its highest level since 2007. Demand at the previous night’s three-year Treasury auction was decent, with the bid-to-cover ratio at its highest since last November. Even so, the real focus was the U.S. Treasury’s 23:00 announcement on the maximum amount for buybacks in the 10- to 20-year sector.
The Treasury had previously said that before Nov. 4, each long-bond buyback would be at least $4 billion, double the previous $2 billion minimum, while leaving room to expand further. Forecasts on the next step differ:
- Morgan Stanley estimates the practical upper limit for a single operation could be near $10 billion. If that level is reached, quarterly net issuance for Treasuries with maturities longer than 20 years could fall by about 55%.
- Wrightson ICAP said $5 billion to $6 billion would be a more reasonable starting point.
- Barclays expects the Treasury may keep the wording open-ended with a “minimum of $4 billion each time” framework to preserve flexibility.
Bessent tried to cool talk that the Treasury is effectively doing quantitative easing. He said the expanded buybacks are meant to reduce the bond market’s “fever” and restore balance, not launch QE. He also rejected arguments centered on U.S. credit concerns, saying that if investors were genuinely worried about U.S. debt, they would be selling Treasuries and moving into German bunds, yet the U.S. bond market has held up better in relative terms.
Bloomberg strategist Brendan Fagan said a buyback size above market expectations could be read as a stronger policy signal and might push long-end yields lower in the short run. Still, because the program is small relative to the size of the Treasury market, PANews noted that analysts see 30-year swap spreads as a cleaner read than nominal yields when it comes to changes in supply expectations.
AI compute demand story grows louder as chips and cloud names rally
Broader indexes were restrained by oil and rates, but capital kept moving into AI compute, optical communications, semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, and storage. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose 1.3%, and the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) gained 1.19%, with 21 components up and 9 down.
OpenAI added to the AI demand case. The company released ChatGPT Images 2.5 and said image generation speed is up by as much as 50%, while weekly output through related models has passed 3 billion images. It also said its latest undisclosed model used just 88 hours and as many as 10,000 AI agents working together to solve the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the Clay Mathematics Institute’s Millennium Prize Problems, at a compute cost of several million dollars.
OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck called the result the “stunning apex” of the last 12 months. UCLA professor Terence Tao compared it to finding a path to a hidden waterfall, saying the result has value but may also weaken the process of deep human understanding, like having a machine go to the gym and lift weights for you. PANews tied that directly to hardware demand: more AI images, video, and agent-based tasks mean more servers, chips, storage, and networking equipment.
IREN CEO Daniel Roberts made the same case in more direct terms. He said global compute supply may never catch up with AI demand because every new unit of capacity can create even more demand. Goldman Sachs expects U.S. data-center capacity to double by the end of 2027 from 2024 levels and to more than triple by 2030 to around 125 gigawatts, enough to power more than 100 cities the size of San Francisco. IREN plans to invest as much as $30 billion in AI over the next year and said it raised about $19 billion over the past 12 months through convertible bonds, chip-backed financing, customer prepayments, and equity financing.
Apple event puts foldable iPhone pricing and margin protection under the spotlight
Apple’s product event at 01:00 the next morning is the main consumer-electronics event on the calendar. It will also be the first major product showcase led by new CEO John Ternus. PANews highlighted three issues the market is watching closely.
- The first foldable iPhone could start at about $2,099, with some discussion pointing to $2,199.
- The Pro models could become $150 to $200 more expensive because of higher memory and storage costs.
- The standard iPhone 18 may be delayed until spring 2027, which would break a release cadence that has lasted for more than a decade.
Mark Gurman said memory shortages have pushed foldable iPhone pricing well above Apple’s earlier assumptions, and higher-capacity versions could approach $3,000. That would help average selling prices but also raise questions about demand elasticity.
BofA Securities said Apple shares often pull back after product launches on a “sell the news” pattern. This year, however, the stock had already fallen about 6% in the 30 to 60 days before the event. The next move, in its view, will depend on the extent of price increases, Siri AI adoption, and management’s comments on foldable iPhone demand. Apple shares fell 1.17% on the day.
Single-stock moves: Intel, Qualcomm, CoreWeave and SpaceX advance
PANews also listed a series of notable moves across individual names and sectors:
- Intel rose 9.05%: the market circulated talk that the company may raise prices on consumer PC processors by about 10% in October, another price move this year and one seen as supportive for margins. AI agents and on-device compute demand also put CPUs back in focus. AMD rose 5.9%, helped by a total addressable market estimate doubling to above $2 trillion and excess orders for Helios. TSMC rose 2.4%, and ASML added 3.8%.
- Qualcomm gained 3.17%: it reached a multigenerational partnership with Amazon for custom AI data-center chips and granted Amazon warrants for as many as 25 million shares at an exercise price of $161.26, tied to a procurement ceiling of $60 billion.
- Lumentum climbed 11.04%: PANews said AI data centers are moving from electrical interconnects to optical interconnects, directly benefiting the company. Corning rose 7.56%, Coherent gained 7.10%, and Applied Optoelectronics added 5.70%.
- CoreWeave rose 11.72%: investors kept buying into the AI compute shortage theme. NEBIUS rose 7.73% after reaching a strategic partnership with Palantir to provide AI-native compute infrastructure and cloud platforms for commercial customers. Oracle rose 2.36%, and IREN added 5.04%.
- Tesla gained 3.98%: after the Cybercab event, Elon Musk confirmed the vehicle’s drive motor uses “zero rare earths” without hurting range. The new rare-earth-free motor is 18% smaller, 25% lighter, and more efficient, according to PANews.
- Storage stocks broadly moved higher: Apple is reportedly in talks with Kioxia on a three- to five-year NAND flash supply agreement and may even avoid setting a strict price ceiling. Seagate rose 6.49%, SK Hynix gained 4.83%, Western Digital added 2.14%, while Micron fell 1.61%.
- SpaceX rose 3.73%, bringing its market value back to $2 trillion. JPMorgan expects the company’s weighting in the Nasdaq 100 quarterly rebalance effective Sept. 21 could rise from 1.25% to about 1.51% after more than 1 billion locked-up shares become available and the free float climbs from below 10% to close to 30%. PANews noted that more than 1 billion additional shares are set to unlock before the end of October, and another roughly 1.3 billion could become tradable after the mid-November earnings report.
- Bloom Energy (BE) rose 9.63%: the company is set to join the S&P 500 before the Sept. 21 open, creating expectations for passive inflows. Strong electricity demand from AI data centers is also drawing attention to power and fuel-cell assets. PANews added that nuclear services company HGP plans to go public through a SPAC, pitching adjustable nuclear power supply for AI data centers.
- Amgen fell 10.08%: a Phase 3 failure tied to a Novartis-related drug raised concerns about the outlook for similar lipoprotein(a) drugs. Novartis fell 13.93%, Eli Lilly lost 2.22%, and Johnson & Johnson also dropped 2.22%.
- Meta slipped 0.53%: the company launched a personal AI agent called Muse for shopping, ticket booking, appointments, and form filling, with paid tiers at $20 and $100 a month. Mark Zuckerberg called personal AI assistants Meta’s biggest commercial opportunity, but the market is still waiting to see real paid conversion. Alphabet rose 0.02%, Microsoft fell 1.15%, Amazon lost 0.60%, and Nvidia dropped 2.01%. PANews said the externalization of Google TPUs and competition around inference economics continue to create incremental pressure on Nvidia.
What the market is watching next
PANews ended the report with several dates and catalysts on the calendar:
- Sept. 9 at 23:00: the U.S. Treasury will announce the maximum amount for long-dated buybacks in the 10- to 20-year sector. PANews said that if the size comes in clearly above $4 billion, especially closer to $6 billion to $10 billion, long-end yields could fall in the short term and support growth-stock valuations. If the Treasury sticks to the minimum, the market may read that as an insufficient policy signal and resume pressure on long bonds.
- Sept. 9-10: Republicans in the U.S. will hold their midterm election conference. The market is watching Donald Trump and the party’s comments on tariffs, fiscal policy, immigration, and energy.
- Sept. 9-10: the Paris Space Summit will take place. Blue Origin, SpaceX, StokeSpace, and Starcloud are reportedly expected to skip the event. PANews said investors should watch for political or commercial friction in U.S.-Europe space cooperation and the possible sentiment effect on commercial space and satellite communication stocks.
- Sept. 9-10: the 11th Belt and Road Summit will be held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, with John Lee in attendance.
- Sept. 10 at 01:00: Apple’s fall hardware event will unveil the first foldable iPhone, iPhone 18 Pro, and iPhone 18 Pro Max. It will be the first major product test for John Ternus. The market is focused on pricing, initial inventory, first-sale arrangements, the size of Pro-model price increases, and gross-margin protection.
- Sept. 10 at 01:00: the U.S. will auction $39 billion in 10-year Treasuries. With the 10-year yield already near 4.78%, the bid-to-cover ratio, indirect bidder demand, and the tail will be key gauges of long-end demand. PANews said that if the auction is weak and yields move toward 5%, that would weigh on banks, real estate, and high-valuation growth stocks; firmer demand would help ease the rate shock.