Good morning, and welcome to the ABC’s finance blog. I’ll be guiding you through the latest market action for the next few hours.<\/p>\n
It’s fair to say markets have\u00a0no idea\u00a0what to make of all the mixed messaging coming out of the White House about how soon war in the Middle East will end.<\/p>\n
How soon will the war end?<\/p>\n
On the one hand, US President Donald Trump suggested vaguely that the war could be over “very soon” in\u00a0an attempt to calm the markets down, after their most brutal sell-off since the introduction of his “Liberation Day” tariffs last year.<\/p>\n
However, his defence secretary Pete Hegseth has since told reporters that today would be the “most intense” day of strikes against Iran.<\/p>\n
US officials contradict each other<\/p>\n
Then you’ve got Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, posting misinformation about the latest situation in the Strait of Hormuz,\u00a0where shipping activity has ground to a halt as a result of Iran’s attacks on vessels passing through that narrow passageway.<\/p>\n
In a social media post overnight, Mr Wright said “the US Navy successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz to ensure oil remains flowing to global markets.”<\/p>\n
But later, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that was not true.<\/p>\n
“I was made aware of this post,” Ms Leavitt told reporters.<\/p>\n
“I haven’t had a chance to talk to the energy secretary about it directly. However, I know the post was taken down pretty quickly.”<\/p>\n
Market reaction<\/p>\n
Despite the confusion about what’s going on, markets are surprisingly chill this morning.<\/p>\n
Brent crude futures dropped 8.1%\u00a0 to around $US91 per barrel.<\/p>\n
That’s a huge drop, considering it spiked to around $US120 earlier this week on fear of a global oil shortage leading to an inflation spike.<\/p>\n
Wall Street, meanwhile, finished relatively flat. The closing figures are:<\/p>\n
Dow Jones: -0.1% to 47,707 pointsS&P 500: -0,2% to 6,781 pointsNasdaq Composite: unchanged at 22,697 points<\/p>\n
The Australian share market, meanwhile, is expected to open slightly higher. ASX futures are pointing to a 0.3% gain when the local trading day begins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Good morning, and welcome to the ABC’s finance blog. I’ll be guiding you through the latest market action…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[2001,64,29217,63,99,2003,2005,164,5284,171,2007,19136,2008,5463,29218,1491],"class_list":["post-531996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-asx","tag-au","tag-aud","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-dollar","tag-dow-jones","tag-economy","tag-gold","tag-markets","tag-nasdaq","tag-oil","tag-sp","tag-sp-500","tag-usd","tag-wall-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}