Everything moving the Street, before it moves you.

Good morning, and happy Juneteenth.

US markets are closed today for the federal holiday, which hands traders a long weekend to make sense of a genuinely strange week, one in which a brand-new Fed chair held rates steady and still managed to spook everyone. (More on that below.)

While the lights are off, a ghost of the last bull market is rattling its chains: the blank-check boom is back. Some 107 SPACs have listed on US exchanges so far in 2026 through June 15, up from 57 over the same stretch a year earlier, according to Dealogic data cited by Reuters, and as of June 17 another 359 of them were sitting on a combined $56.8 billion in dry powder hunting for targets. If your inbox starts filling with pitch decks that want to merge your long weekend with a flying-taxi startup, you'll know the era has officially rhymed. Welcome back to 2021 — try not to buy anything you can't pronounce.

Semiconductors

Intel's foundry turnaround just found an unlikely hype man: the President of the United States.

In a Truth Social post, President Trump said Apple "has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its chips in America," and the market didn't wait for the fine print. Intel ripped to a fresh record high. The catch, and it's a big one: neither Apple nor Intel has confirmed a word of it.

Still, traders grabbed the narrative with both hands. Intel's long-suffering manufacturing arm, the piece of its turnaround that has been desperate for a marquee outside customer, suddenly had the most famous one imaginable dangled in front of it.

Apple designs its own chips but leans entirely on Taiwan's TSMC to actually make them, and that dependence is the whole subtext. Intel jumped nearly 8% to a record as the broader chip index also notched a high, InvestorIdeas reported, even though, as CNBC noted, the only source for the deal so far is the president's post. On the Bloomberg Tech podcast, Bloomberg Intelligence's Mandeep Singh explained why the market bit: one marquee foundry win "follows with multiple companies," and with Nvidia having prepaid roughly $120 billion for TSMC capacity, even Apple has reason to want a second source.

And Intel isn't the only one taking aim at the leaders. The same day, Bloomberg reported that Amazon is in talks to sell its custom-made AI chips for use in other companies' data centers, a notable expansion of its push to cut into Nvidia's dominance. AWS infrastructure chief Peter DeSantis said the company has begun discussions with potential customers but declined to name them, and sees AI infrastructure as rapidly evolving. The timing isn't subtle: Amazon's third-generation Trainium accelerator is largely sold out, with strong interest already building for a fourth version due next year.

Apple, meanwhile, is getting squeezed from the other direction. CEO Tim Cook, soon to become executive chairman, told the Wall Street Journal that price increases are "unavoidable" and the memory-cost situation has become "unsustainable," as the same AI-data-center boom that has buyers scrambling for chips drives up the cost of memory and storage. TechInsights pegs the memory and storage bill in an iPhone 17 Pro at about $50 last year; for the coming iPhone 18 Pro, it is closer to $200. Cook said Apple is even "willing to use our balance sheet" to help secure supply.

For investors, the read-through runs both ways. Pricier iPhones, iPads and Macs can shield Apple's industry-leading margins from the memory shock, but only if its pricing power holds and shoppers don't stretch their upgrade cycles or trade down to cheaper models. The squeeze is also a tell for the whole tape: the AI-infrastructure boom is leaking out of the data center and into the consumer's pocket, a tailwind for memory makers like Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung and a margin headwind for every device maker that has to buy from them.

Trust, but Verify: Until Apple or Intel actually signs something, this is a presidential press release, not a purchase order, and Intel still has to prove its most advanced process can churn out Apple-grade chips at volume. But the direction of travel is real: Washington owns a stake in Intel, has leaned on buyers to work with it, and just handed the foundry the one thing money can't buy — a halo. If the deal firms up, it redraws the domestic-chip map; if it evaporates, today's record sets up tomorrow's hangover.

Written by PT

Economics

Connect the dots and the image that emerges isn't the rate cut Wall Street was waiting to color in.

Kevin Warsh's debut meeting as Federal Reserve chair ended Wednesday exactly as the consensus had sketched it, with no change to interest rates, held in a range of 3.50%–3.75%. It was the projections that smudged the page. The Fed's updated "dot plot," the quarterly chart of where each policymaker thinks rates are heading, suddenly pointed up instead of down.

Stocks recoiled, then second-guessed themselves. Equities sold off Wednesday as the hawkish dots landed, before clawing back a chunk of the loss Thursday, leaving investors arguing over which reaction was the honest one.

The dot plot is normally the sleepiest exhibit in the Fed's slide deck. This one read like a thriller's final act: a committee that markets had spent months betting would cut is now openly penciling in the opposite.

By the numbers: the median dot for year-end 2026 jumped to 3.8%, a sharp revision up from the 3.4% the same officials drew in March; nine of 18 policymakers now put rates above the current range by December; and the committee yanked its 2026 PCE inflation forecast all the way to 3.6% from 2.7% just three months ago, per CNBC. Warsh himself, conspicuously, declined to submit a dot at all.

Bloomberg Intelligence chief US rates strategist Ira Jersey flagged the catch on the firm's podcast: the market is now pricing "a couple of" hikes followed by a cut, and "one of those two things is wrong." His base case is a Fed that simply holds for the rest of the year.

Higher for Longer: The signal isn't really about June — it's about the back half of the year. A Fed willing to put hikes back on the easel is a Fed telling investors not to wait up for the cheap-money cavalry. Warsh built his reputation arguing the central bank talks too much; on his first day, he let a scatter of dots do the talking, and the message colored well outside the lines markets had drawn for him.

Written by VS

Technology

The firm that bills the world to manage its transformation just got a brutal lesson in managing its own.

Shares of Accenture (ACN) fell more than 14% intraday Thursday and settled near 16% lower by the close, its sharpest drubbing in years, after the consulting giant beat on earnings but guided quarterly sales below estimates and trimmed its full-year outlook. In a market already jittery that generative AI could hollow out the labor-heavy consulting model, a guidance cut was all the excuse traders needed to reach for the exits.

The irony writes itself: the outfit whose entire pitch is "let us steer your reinvention" spent Thursday being asked to explain its own. Analysts had been circling for weeks. Morgan Stanley moved the stock to Equal-Weight on June 15, citing an AI-spending inflection that hasn't shown up, and JPMorgan had already trimmed its price target on AI concerns.

Not everyone reads it as the machines winning. Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Anurag Rana noted on the firm's podcast that Accenture's headcount actually rose last quarter, hardly the shape of a company being hollowed out by AI, calling the reaction "a classic case of traditional spending not being strong" rather than proof of disruption.

Disruptor, Disrupted: AI is simultaneously Accenture's loudest sales pitch and its scariest competitor, and Thursday was the market voting on which force wins. The bull case says enterprises still need humans to actually deploy all this software; the bear case says the software increasingly deploys itself. One quarter won't settle the argument — but it put the question, firmly, on the clock.

Written by PS

Energy

After months of white-knuckling the world's most important oil chokepoint, traders finally got to loosen their grip.

A US–Iran agreement to end the fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, announced over the past week, did what nothing else had managed since February: it pulled the panic premium out of crude. For an energy market that spent the spring pricing in the worst, it was the first genuine exhale in a long while.

The conflict had turned a routine shipping lane into the single biggest variable in the global economy, and the unwind is proving every bit as consequential as the spike. US crude slid more than 5% to around $80 a barrel and Brent eased about 4.5% to roughly $83 — the lowest for both since the first week of March — even as crude still sits about 40% higher than where it began the year, NBC News reported. The relief is real but unfinished: the average US retail gallon still reads $4.07, some 36% above its February 28 level, and the chokepoint won't clear overnight. Kpler estimates roughly 500 large commercial vessels are stranded in the region, a backlog that could take two to three months to normalize, while ECB President Christine Lagarde warned this week that higher energy costs are already seeping into the broader economy.

How durable is the calm? On Bloomberg Intelligence's podcast, defense analyst Wayne Sanders — a retired US Army colonel — called the truce "a pretty good sign" (the Iranian president is engaged, with no IRGC backlash yet) but warned the next 60 days of nuclear talks will be "rough," with the gulf between civilian-grade 3–20% enrichment and weapons-grade 90% the likely sticking point.

Humpty Hormuz: As Société Générale strategist Kit Juckes put it, one of the lessons buried in nursery rhymes is that you can't put an egg back together after a fall — and crude has clambered only two-thirds of the way back up the wall. Expect a quieter, longer story to trail the headline one: insurers, shipowners and crews who need convincing the strait is truly safe, and a world freshly reminded just how fragile a single waterway can make the price of everything.

Written by HS

Markets are dark for Juneteenth, which means today the loudest thing on the Street is the silence — and a brand-new Fed chair letting a fistful of dots do all the shouting. Enjoy the long weekend; the dots will still be there Monday, and so will we.

That's the tape. We'll see you at the open. — AllThingsWallSt