Midweek by the Numbers — Mar 25, 2026
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"To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war." — Winston Churchill
Mar 25, 2026
Brent Crude Slid Below $95 This Morning After the U.S. Sent Iran a 15-Point Ceasefire Plan via Pakistan
Overnight, the New York Times reported that a comprehensive peace proposal had reached Tehran through Pakistani intermediaries, sending S&P 500 futures up more than 1% and Brent tumbling from near $101. The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed — so oil's floor is real — but every diplomatic headline is now moving markets by several percentage points in either direction, in minutes.
Source: Bloomberg / New York Times / Yahoo Finance
Arm Just Said One Chip — Its First-Ever — Will Generate $15 Billion a Year by 2031, Six Times the Company's Entire 2025 Revenue
After 35 years as the chip industry's silent architect, Arm unveiled its first in-house silicon this week — the AGI CPU — designed for AI inference, with Meta as lead partner and OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google among early adopters. The stock jumped 13% in premarket Wednesday after CEO Rene Haas projected $25 billion in total annual revenue by 2031; for a company that made $4 billion last year, that's either a remarkable forecast or a remarkable aspiration.
Source: CNBC / Bloomberg
March Madness Will Cost U.S. Employers an Estimated $13.1 Billion in Lost Productivity — and the Sweet 16 Tips Off Thursday
The Action Network's survey found that 11.6 million workers expect to spend an average of 1.5 hours per day on tournament content during the first week of games alone, which works out to roughly $1,125 per distracted employee based on current labor data. Economists have a technical term for this: a productivity externality. Everyone else calls it Thursday.
Source: The Action Network / Challenger, Gray and Christmas
The U.S. Owes the Rest of the World $27.6 Trillion on Net — the BEA Released Its Full International Investment Position Data This Morning
The U.S. net international investment position — what Americans own abroad minus what foreigners own here — was -$27.61 trillion at the end of Q3 2025, and the Q4 2025 figures the BEA published this morning cover the quarter when U.S. stocks hit all-time highs, which perversely tends to make the position worse by inflating the value of the foreign-held U.S. equities counted as liabilities. The number was -$19.85 trillion just two years ago.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis — International Investment Position, Q4 2025
Enterprise Software Stocks Are Down 23% in 2026 — the Same Year Companies Are Pouring Trillions Into the AI That's Disrupting Them
The iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF (IGV) has fallen 23% year-to-date, with Salesforce shedding more than 6% on Tuesday alone, as investors increasingly price in the possibility that AI agents will compress software licensing revenue the same way streaming compressed cable. And the irony isn't subtle: software companies are also some of the biggest buyers of the AI infrastructure that is eating their business models.
Source: CNBC / iShares