Market conditions these days are kinda like the weather in Ireland: If you don’t like it, check again in 15 minutes. And now, all of a sudden, everyone is seeing sunshine and rainbows.

As global trade tensions appear to cool, consumer sentiment has rebounded — sharply. In fact, the latest consumer sentiment report from the Conference Board, released Tuesday, showed the largest month-to-month jump in confidence in four years. Business owners, on the other hand, aren’t exactly seeing a pot of gold at the end of it all.

Deal or No Deal

You can’t bounce back without first getting low. And, in April, consumer confidence got low — with sentiment in the Conference Board’s monthly survey falling for the fifth straight month to levels not seen since the Covid-19 pandemic. For reference, April’s reading was still a healthy tick above levels seen following the 2008 financial crisis, and May’s 12-point rebound still leaves the index about 12 points shy of its post-election, pre-trade war sugar rush.

So what’s changed in the past month? For starters, the May 12 trade war armistice between the US and China. Interestingly, however, the Conference Board noted in its report Tuesday that half of the survey responses came in before the truce agreement, and also showed confidence ticking upward. “The rebound was already visible before the May 12 US-China trade deal but gained momentum afterwards,” senior Conference Board economist Stephanie Guichard wrote in the statement.

Translation: The shell shock of Liberation Day tariff announcements wore off somewhat quickly for consumers, possibly due to the stop-and-start nature of the White House’s levy rollouts. Business owners, on the other hand, are still operating a bit cautiously:

• Tuesday also delivered the latest core capital goods report from the US Commerce Department, which showed business spending on equipment plunged 1.3% in April. That would suggest businesses are finding it difficult to plan for the year ahead due to the new tariff regime. Data showing whether May brought a similar bounce in sentiment among business owners will take at least another month.
• “I have predicted for months that business investment will be the main driver of a softer economic performance this year, as executives postpone their capital projects until they have more clarity on policy,” Stephen Stanley, chief US economist at Santander US Capital Markets, told Reuters. “These data offer the first confirming evidence of that hypothesis.”

EU and I: Consumers’ trade-deal optimism may be rewarded. The Conference Board stopped taking survey responses on May 19, just days before POTUS announced 50% tariffs on European Union goods starting June 1. But, by Monday, the White House said the tariffs would be delayed until July 9, while European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says the two sides have agreed to fast-track talks to get a deal done before then. The good news triggered a nearly 1.8% jump on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and a more than 2% jump on the S&P 500 on Tuesday, snapping four-day losing streaks for both indexes.

The forecast is cloudy with a high chance of AI for Salesforce after its agreement to pay $8 billion for software firm Informatica, which manages cloud data for companies from Toyota to Unilever.

Salesforce’s offer beat out competitors including Cloud Software Group and Thoma Bravo, according to The Wall Street Journal. The purchase would be Salesforce’s biggest since its $28 billion acquisition of Slack in 2021.

The Agentic AI Race

AI agents are the next level of AI assistants. Instead of answering simple queries, they’re built to perform complex tasks autonomously — such as answering customer service calls.

Salesforce offers AI-agent services like the above through its “Agentforce” platform, for which it has closed more than 1,000 deals so far. Last week, Salesforce expanded the platform to financial services with virtual representatives that can, for instance, make loan recommendations.

The Informatica acquisition will enable Salesforce to continue scaling up its platform, helping to create “the most complete, agent-ready data platform in the industry,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said.

But Salesforce isn’t the only company pushing into agentic AI:

• Microsoft began launching AI agents last year, including an “Interpreter” that can live-translate nine languages in Teams meetings and a “Project Manager” that can create plans, assign tasks, and track them.
• OpenAI introduced a new agent that can code this month, its third agentic offering, while cloud provider Oracle offers more than 50 specialized AI agents. Meta expects its AI model to power agents that’ll be used by hundreds of millions of businesses.

Future-Proofing: Salesforce has been under pressure to pump up profits since activist investing firm Elliott Management took a stake in the tech company two years ago. After years of backing off acquisitions to preserve capital, Salesforce is once again making deals with the hope that they’ll pay off in the long run. The Informatica deal is on the smaller side compared with some of Salesforce’s past purchases, and considering how hyped Big Tech is about agentic AI, it has a lot of potential upside. Earlier this month, Salesforce signed an agreement to buy Convergence, another company that would boost its AI agent offerings.

When President Trump gave his seal of approval to Nippon Steel’s controversial merger with US Steel on Friday, the details were hardly iron-clad.

That changed Tuesday, when a leading politician in US Steel’s home state detailed how the federal government will maintain a say over key decision-making.

Alloying Their Concerns

Nippon, Japan’s largest steelmaker with $58.7 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ended March 31, has been angling to acquire US Steel since December 2023. But its $14.9 billion bid drew the ire of Trump and former President Joe Biden, with both suggesting America’s second-largest steelmaker should be off-limits to foreign owners.

The company’s headquarters being in Pennsylvania, a key swing state in the November presidential election, added an ultra-sensitive political dimension to an already controversial proposal, which the United Steelworkers union vocally opposed over fears Nippon might cut jobs. Biden blocked the deal in January on national security grounds, and last month, Trump’s administration launched a new review of the deal by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Then, late last week, Trump seemingly backed the acquisition, calling it a “partnership” that would keep the company’s headquarters in Pittsburgh and create “at least 70,000 jobs.” On Tuesday, Republican Pennsylvania Senator David McCormick revealed that strings would be attached to the deal to allay national security and other concerns:

• McCormick said the US would receive a so-called “golden share” in US Steel, which would grant the federal government a de facto veto over key decisions. In an interview with CNBC, he noted the golden share will “essentially require US government approval of a number of the board members, and that will allow the United States to ensure production levels aren’t cut and things like that.”
• McCormick added that US Steel would still be led by an American CEO and that US nationals would make up the majority of the board. The terms would be laid out in a CFIUS agreement that Nippon would ink with the federal government, he said, noting the prospective Japanese parent proposed the idea because it “wanted an opportunity to get access to the US market.” (The merger would create the second-largest steelmaker in the world.)

Promises Made: US steelmakers have been undercut by the rise of low-cost producers abroad and hurt by failures to adopt new technologies at home, but Nippon has promised to reverse that with $14 billion in investments. According to McCormick, that will include $2.4 billion toward the company’s plant in suburban Mon Valley. The final details will have to wait until a “BIG rally” that Trump promised this Friday in Pittsburgh.