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The infoshot to help kick-start your week

Muddled messages lead to another mixed week for oil prices and markets

Oil prices fell on Monday after President Trump postponed his threatened attack on Iranian power plants. Similar to what we saw during “Liberation Day” tariff U-turns last year, there was a flurry of unusual activity on oil and S&P futures before Trump announced the postponement. The number of bets on crude and brent oil contracts effectively increased threefold exactly ten minutes before the announcement sparking fresh speculation about insider trading.

As the week progressed, Iran dismissed the US’s 15-point peace plan and proposed legislation to collect tolls from ships that want to travel through the Strait of Hormuz. According to International Maritime Organisation Secretary-General, Arsenio Dominguez, there are nearly 2,000 ships currently waiting to sail through the strait.

3,500 US marines and sailors arrived in the Middle East aboard the USS Tripoli this weekend, joining the roughly 50,000 troops already stationed in the region. The USS Tripoli is an amphibious assault ship, and unlike standard aircraft carriers, its primary role is to put troops and combat vehicles onto land. Last night in an interview with the FT, Trump said, “my favourite thing is to take the oil in Iran” and suggested that US forces could be used to seize the export hub on Kharg Island. Following Trump’s comments, brent crude oil has surged to $115 a barrel.

With $120 oil prices now a real possibility, South Korean politicians have said they may extend their five-day rotating public sector car ban to also include private cars. Earlier in the week, Japan released 80mn barrels of oil from their reserves, the equivalent to 45 days of domestic demand, and 1.8 times more than the amount released after the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in 2011.

Pre-war UK inflation stays at 3%

The latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) numbers from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed UK inflation stayed at 3% during February. Last week’s release marks the final data from before the war in Iran and many economists now expect the next reading to rise following the shock to energy prices caused by the conflict.

From careless to callous – landmark lawsuits send Meta and Alphabet shares tumbling

Shares in Meta and Alphabet fell 13% and 9% respectively following their defeats in a landmark social media addiction trial.

The case was tried in Los Angeles. A woman known as “Kaley”, sued both firms over her childhood addiction to social media. The jurors decided that she should receive $3mn in compensation and charged Meta and Google (through their ownership of YouTube) an additional $3mn in punitive charges because they “acted with malice, oppression or fraud” when operating their platforms. A day earlier, Meta was also found liable by a jury in New Mexico for the way its platform endangers children and exposes them to sexually explicit material and sexual predators. Both these decisions could have serious implications for hundreds of similar cases that are going through US courts at the moment.

In another blow to social media firms, here in the UK, Sir Kier Starmer backed banning addictive social media features. He said the government was “going to have to act” to stop algorithms from hooking in young people and children.

On top of the Meta and Alphabet selloffs, the NASDAQ suffered its fifth consecutive downwards week as the war in Iran continues to weigh heavily on US tech stocks.

On the AI side of tech news, Wednesday saw OpenAI shut down the AI video-generation app Sora and end its $1bn content partnership with Disney. Since its launch two years ago, Sora had an estimated daily inference cost of $15mn and made just $2.1mn in total lifetime revenue. The deal between OpenAI and Disney was only signed in December.