Take a deep breath. Since Israel and the United States began striking Iran in the early hours of Saturday, ship traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, passage to a fifth of the world’s daily crude supply, has come close to a halt amid Tehran’s threats to attack vessels. After a drone attack on Monday, Aramco suspended operations at Saudi Arabia’s largest refinery, a key export hub that processes 550,000 barrels of oil per day. The same day in Qatar, a supplier of 20% of the world’s liquefied natural gas, state-owned QatarEnergy halted LNG production. And on Tuesday, Iraq, the second-largest OPEC producer, began massive production cuts as the Hormuz standoff threatens to overwhelm storage capacity. And breathe in again.

Is that everything? At this rate, probably not. But it’s a snapshot of the enormous pressure energy markets are facing this week. And pricing signals back home in the US indicate cost hikes are materializing quickly.

Potpourri of Petroleum Problems

Futures in Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, rose $4.7% to a $81.40 per barrel on Tuesday, the highest since January 2025. They’re up roughly 12% since Saturday. Crude oil, of course, is the essential ingredient in gas and diesel fuel, meaning when it goes up, prices at the pump often follow. The price of unleaded in the US jumped 11 cents overnight Tuesday to $3.11 a gallon, according to AAA. That was the biggest single-day jump in four years. Fuel distributor Gulf Oil projects it could peak between $3.25 and $3.50 this spring.

The White House clearly took notice. Brent pulled back from a session high on Tuesday after President Donald Trump announced the US will provide naval escorts to tankers as soon as possible. He also said the federal government will offer insurance and guarantees for Gulf maritime trade, a crucial step after leading maritime insurers began canceling war risk coverage for vessels in the Gulf. Other considerations are also at play:

• Exposure to the Strait of Hormuz varies considerably: The Americas import just 12.5% of oil from the strait, while China imports 45.7%, according to Kpler. No wonder Beijing called on all parties to protect tankers in the region (China’s also the world’s largest LNG importer, and its intervention could help European countries slammed by rising prices).
• ​​Former broker and current transport industry consultant Rob Carpenter observed that, while the US is the world’s largest oil producer and churned out a record 13.6 million barrels per day in 2025, federal officials estimated refining capacity would fall 3% by the end of last year. He also pointed to pipeline takeaway capacity, often unable to keep up with production in the Texas oil basin, arguing that fixing domestic bottlenecks would reduce costs for consumers and reduce exposure to global disruptions.

No Telling from Here: Trump has said the Iran campaign may last five weeks or “far longer than that.” In the meantime, it might be wise to fill up the tank.

Apple, the exclusive US broadcaster of Formula One, is in a race of its own in artificial intelligence, and until recently, almost no one had it pegged as a winner. With its spring hardware refresh, it’s putting pedal to the metal.

The tech behemoth has been unveiling a slew of updates and new products this week, most of which offer customers hardware that is better equipped to handle the AI innovations constantly thrown their way. The new MacBook Air will be powered by Apple’s M5 chip, while the new MacBook Pro will run on the latest chips, the M5 Pro and M5 Max. The company also revealed the iPhone 17e, which enables Apple Intelligence and other AI models to run faster, and the new iPad Air comes with (you guessed it) a better chip.

“With M5, MacBook Air powers through a wide range of tasks, from everyday productivity to creative workloads, and is even faster for AI,” John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, said in a statement. Separately, the company said the new MacBook Pro will deliver “up to 4x AI performance compared to the previous generation.”

Reckoning and Revamp

Apple’s AI-focused product revamp comes as the company trails its tech rivals, such as Meta, Amazon and Alphabet, in harnessing the fast-growing technology. Critics say that customers don’t come to Apple solely for hardware; they come for a top-of-the-line experience using their phones, computers and other devices, and that increasingly includes AI innovations. In December, the company’s AI head, John Giannandrea, stepped down after being sidelined for much of last year, per Bloomberg, and the company spent less on AI than its peers.

Whatever customers’ motivations for buying Apple products, one thing is certain: Its AI comeback will cost them:

• The new MacBook Airs start at $1,099 for the 13-inch and $1,299 for the 15-inch, a $100 price bump for each, although they come with more storage.
• The MacBook Pros are getting more expensive, too.

Memory Squeeze: Suppliers aren’t as keen on offering memory chips to consumer hardware makers as they are on handing those chips over to AI data centers. The tight supply is part of what’s driving up prices. “What we are witnessing is not a temporary squeeze, but a tsunami-like shock originating in the memory supply chain, with ripple effects spreading across the entire consumer electronics industry,” Francisco Jeronimo, who leads research on mobile devices at the IDC, said in a recent report.

With the S&P 500 down 0.9%, Tuesday was choppy at best for markets. One company, however, managed to live up to its name and hit the mark.

Shares in stagnant retailer Target rose 6.4% as executives pitched investors on a turnaround plan during an event at the company’s Minneapolis HQ. Their upbeat projections follow a tough few years.

Right on Tarjay

Minneapolis gave the world Prince, an outsider virtuoso alternative to Michael Jackson’s pop, and Hüsker Dü, the college radio alternative to rock itself. With Target, it spawned “cheap chic” or “affordable joy,” the notion of a more fashionable big box retailer that was at least perceptually an alternative to rivals focused on low prices. The objective was not to beat Walmart prices, though Target sometimes did, but to offer affordability with panache, as exhibited by partnerships with runway designers like Marc Jacobs and Isaac Mizrahi.

For a long time, that worked, but as consumers’ affordability concerns spiked in recent years, many gravitated toward the low prices at Walmart and Amazon. Target’s shares have slid nearly 50% from their 2021 peak, sales have slumped as people spend less on home furnishing and discretionary purchases, and its limited grocery footprint left it at a disadvantage. On Tuesday, the company reported a poor holiday season, with sales falling 1.5% to cap off a year in which they fell 1.7%. So why did the stock pop? It’s all about the forecast:

• Executives said sales rose in February and that they expect to do roughly 2% more in retail this year. Target is also spending to win back market share, allocating $5 billion for capital spending this year, a 25% increase, to remodel old stores, open new ones, and fund upgrades.
• The retailer is also adding new food, beauty, apparel and home decor items (high-end sunscreen Supergoop and an expanded denim line with Levi’s, for example) and has laid off white-collar workers to staff up stores after years of complaints about disorganized shelves and long checkout lines.

Different Kind of Promotion: Target’s revamp is being led by Michael Fiddelke, who took over as CEO only last month. While some investors were banking on an outsider, he’s the complete opposite: He started as an intern in 2003, giving hope to the handful of interns in a mean, mean AI world.