Financial Market News | Saturday Review

Last Saturday closed with the largest IPO in history trading 30 percent above its offer price. Six open questions followed it into Monday.

This Saturday closes with most of those questions answered. The answers are bigger than the questions were.

Kevin Warsh chaired his first Fed meeting and closed the door on rate cuts. SpaceX (SPCX) bought Cursor parent Anysphere for $60 billion. It briefly passed Microsoft (MSFT) to become the fourth-largest U.S. company. Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook said iPhone prices are rising because AI data centers locked up the global memory supply.

A single thread ran through every story. The AI economy stopped being valued on what it might become. It started being valued on what it costs.

Here are the six threads that mattered.

I know because I've seen the evidence firsthand.

On March 2nd — three days after the first missiles hit — I sat across from two U.S. Congressmen in back-to-back private meetings.

Those meetings pointed me toward something I spent weeks verifying.

The real purpose behind the strikes. The real objective. And the single company at the dead center of all of it.

This isn't random. It's a calculated Two-Front Economic War.

And there's one company positioned right at the heart of it.

See the strategy behind the Iran war — and the company at the center of it

The sooner you understand what's really happening — the better positioned you'll be before August 12th.

— Dylan Jovine, Founder, Behind the Markets

Kevin Warsh chaired his first Fed meeting Wednesday. Rates stayed at 3.5 to 3.75 percent. The mechanical action was routine. The communication shift was not.

The post-meeting statement came in at 132 words. The April statement was 345. Warsh cut two-thirds of it. He also declined to submit his own dot to the dot plot.

Then the dots landed. Nine of 19 officials marked a rate hike for year-end. In March, zero did. Just one expects a cut, down from twelve. The 2-year Treasury yield jumped 16 basis points.

The new language did something no prior Fed statement has. It named the AI boom a "durable force" adding structural inflation pressure. The Fed officially called AI infrastructure spending a lasting input to prices.

The Takeaway

The language governing how markets price the rate path changed Wednesday. Every model entering 2026 assumed two or three cuts. Those models now rebuild around a flat funds rate through 2027. That makes the cost of capital for every AI buildout structurally higher.

SpaceX priced at $135 last Thursday. Shares closed Monday at $192.50, up 42 percent in three sessions. The pullback critics expected never arrived.

Tuesday delivered the corporate action of the week. SpaceX agreed to buy Cursor parent Anysphere for $60 billion in stock. The deal answered three of the loudest critiques of SPCX's $2 trillion valuation in one move. Grok had no enterprise customers. Cursor brought them. AI revenue was years away. Cursor's $4 billion annualized revenue arrived immediately. The AI price war hurt SpaceX. Cursor routes customers across models, so SpaceX benefits from the war instead.

SPCX briefly passed Microsoft Tuesday to become the fourth-largest U.S. company. Then Wednesday delivered the first pullback. The stock fell 5 percent after the Fed meeting.

The Takeaway

Goldman Sachs (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS) published projections for SpaceX at $160 billion in revenue by 2028. That is eight times the 2025 level. CFRA still rates the stock a sell at $115. Morningstar (MORN) values it at $63. The institutional disagreement spans a $129 range on a $190 stock.

For a moment…

Forget about Trump’s ties to Israel.

Forget about reports of Iran’s nuclear program.

Because my research has led me to believe we’re risking World War 3 with Iran for a completely different reason.

Click here to find out what it is.

If you have even a single dollar invested in the U.S. stock market, this is going to directly impact you.

Discover the reason here.

Tim Cook gave the Wall Street Journal an exclusive interview Wednesday night. Memory chip prices have quadrupled since AI hyperscalers started competing for supply. Cook called it a "hundred-year flood." Apple cannot avoid raising prices.

TechInsights estimates the next iPhone Pro could cost $270 more. Morgan Stanley expects smartphone prices to rise 15 percent this year.

Cook named the cause directly. Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL), Microsoft, and Meta (META) locked up memory supply for data centers. Apple lost its preferred position. Micron (MU) shares are up dramatically over the past year as the squeeze tightened. A device industry consortium sent a letter to Treasury and Commerce asking for help reallocating supply.

Thursday landed the political response. Trump announced on Truth Social that Apple agreed to work with Intel (INTC) to design and build chips in the United States. Intel rose 8 percent. The sequencing was not subtle. Cook's interview gave Trump the most politically effective consumer argument for reshoring available.

The Takeaway

Consumer device buyers are now absorbing AI infrastructure costs directly. Voters being told AI data centers raised their phone prices is a very specific kind of bad news.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and GitHub all moved from flat-rate subscriptions to usage-based billing this week. AI agents now run for hours at a time. Unlimited access at a flat fee became economically impossible.

Sam Altman framed the shift directly. AI will be "a utility, like electricity or water, on a meter."

Enterprise customers are already adjusting. Walmart (WMT) capped staff use of an in-house AI agent. Uber (UBER) limited employees to $1,500 per month per coding tool. The era of unlimited internal AI usage ended in two of the largest U.S. companies in the same week.

Cheaper alternatives benefit immediately. Chinese open-source models including DeepSeek and Alibaba's (BABA) Qwen consume less compute per task. When per-task pricing becomes visible, lower-cost models become more competitive for routine work.

The Takeaway

Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to public markets while changing their revenue model. Subscription revenue is forecastable. Usage-based revenue is not. The first few quarters under the new pricing are a black box for anyone trying to build a forecast.

If you have any money in the stock market, you may want to pay attention.

New research points to a massive market-moving event that could send hundreds of popular stocks into a sudden free fall.

Holding the wrong stocks when this hits could erase years of gains.

That’s why analysts have now identified a list of stocks investors may want to avoid as this event unfolds.

If you want to see what’s coming — and which stocks could be most at risk —

Click here to get the full details before it’s too late.

Individual investors requested $12 billion in withdrawals from four large private credit funds in Q2. That was up from $7.7 billion in Q1. New business development company sales fell 74 percent year over year in April to $1.6 billion, the lowest total since May 2023.

The pressure compounded in software lending. Blue Owl (OWL), Blackstone (BX), Apollo (APO), and BlackRock's (BLK) HPS unit have effectively stopped making new software loans. Credit spreads on software deals widened from 400 basis points to 800 in some cases. Some lenders now require software borrowers to be profitable before they will lend at all.

U.S. software buyout volume in the first five months of 2026 ran at half last year's pace. Morningstar projects a one-to-two-year elevated redemption cycle ahead.

The Takeaway

AI disruption moved from tail risk to baseline assumption in private credit underwriting in roughly six weeks. Software companies without demonstrated AI integration cannot get financed at reasonable rates. The first BDC to disclose a named software credit impairment makes this visible to public markets.

Private shareholder documents leaked Tuesday with OpenAI's Q1 numbers. The company burned $3.7 billion on $5.7 billion in revenue. That is roughly 65 cents spent for every dollar earned, before R&D, sales, or overhead.

Annualized, the burn rate approaches $15 billion per year. SoftBank's $40 billion bridge loan is due March 2027. OpenAI is heading to public markets at a $1 trillion target valuation. That works out to roughly 43 times annualized Q1 revenue.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are running both AI IPOs at once. The banks are building information-walled teams to prevent cross-flow between the rival deals. Two more $100 million fees per bank represent $400 million in additional revenue. That aligns institutional urgency with execution.

The Takeaway

The race to file has become a race against scrutiny. The first sell-side analyst to publish a valuation model using OpenAI's actual burn rate names the floor publicly. The walled banking teams say the IPO window is narrowing, not widening.

But one market statistic — praised by Warren Buffett as the best measure of valuations — is now flashing a historic warning.

It’s currently higher than it was at the peak of the Dot-Com Bubble.

If the signal proves accurate, the coming AI unwind could shake the entire market.

See the alarming stat — and what investors should do before the next crash unfolds.

The AI race stopped being theoretical last week.

This week, markets started learning what it costs.

Higher rates. Higher memory prices. New pricing models. Tighter software credit. Bigger AI burn rates.

The story survived. SpaceX held. Both AI giants are still racing to file. Memory makers are setting all-time highs.

The economics underneath all of it got a lot more visible.