INSIGHT WEEKLY: March 8, 2026
📩 Images not loading? Click “Download external images” or read the full magazine online via the link above.
See my website with travel and lifestyle
https://iweekly.news
⏳ A focused, 5 minute reading time, weekly summary
🌐 Markets Overview
📈 Last week saw a dip due to nervousness on AI stocks. This week was dominated by the conflict in the Middle East.
🌐 Markets Overview
📈 The week ending March 6 was defined by the conflict in the Middle East. Every major index finished lower. The market is in price-discovery mode on what a prolonged Middle East conflict means for energy, inflation and growth.
Gold fell with the rest of the market rather than acting as a safe haven. What did respond to the inflation threat was the bond market, with the US 10-year yield rising 16 basis points on the week as investors repriced the Fed's path.
European markets bore the brunt of the sell-off given the continent's deep dependence on imported energy, while the relative resilience of US indexes reflects America's position as a net energy exporter.
Oil was the dominant macro signal this week. The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly one-fifth of global oil and LNG flows, and even the risk of disruption is enough to embed a significant war premium. WTI's monthly move is its sharpest since the Ukraine invasion in March 2022.
🛢️ WTI Crude Oil: The Iran Shock in Historical Context
The dominant peaks on the chart were geopolitical supply shocks. These were resolved over months as markets found alternative supply routes. This week's move may prove harder to contain.
Joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran triggered an immediate 8% single-day surge in WTI. The Strait of Hormuz, now effectively closed to commercial traffic, is the world's most critical energy chokepoint. Roughly one-fifth of global oil passes through it daily, alongside significant volumes of LNG (liquefied natural gas, the fuel that heats homes and powers industry across Europe and Asia) and LPG (liquefied petroleum gas, used widely for cooking, heating and petrochemicals). Qatar, the world's largest LNG exporter, routes virtually all of its output through the Strait, leaving Europe particularly exposed after rebuilding its gas supply chain around Qatari LNG following the break with Russian gas in 2022.
The key question is duration. If the Strait remains closed beyond a few weeks, the $100 scenario moves from tail risk to base case.
Major AI Stocks Performance
Hyperscalers presented a split picture. Iranian drone strikes hit three AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain, causing structural damage, power disruptions and fire suppression incidents. AWS advised customers to migrate workloads to alternate regions. Amazon's stock held up, reflecting the scale and redundancy of its global operations. Meta and Alphabet underperformed, reflecting broader risk-off sentiment given their exposure to advertising markets.
Enterprise AI was the week's standout. Palantir surged 14.6%, recovering much of its 2026 losses. The move reflects the conflict context - Palantir's core business in defence intelligence puts it in a strong position as government spending accelerates. This follows Q4 2025 earnings in which total revenue grew 70% year on year to $1.41 billion. The stock had sold off significantly since those results, making this week's move a catch-up as much as a fresh catalyst. Snowflake also recovered, up 7.2% on the week.
Semis came under pressure from two directions - broader risk-off selling and a proposed US regulatory framework that would sharply broaden approval requirements for overseas AI chip shipments. TSMC held up relatively better, consistent with the market's ongoing preference for companies closer to physical chip manufacturing.
Infra remains the strongest performing group on a YTD basis. The AWS facility strikes add further context to why physical resilience and power infrastructure continue to attract investor interest.
China names continued to underperform. Baidu and Alibaba face domestic headwinds including weak consumer demand and a lowered national growth target, alongside the ongoing overhang of AI chip export restrictions.
Macro Watch: This Week’s Economic Developments
🇺🇸 United States: Stagflation Warning Lights
Nonfarm payrolls fell by 92,000 in February, well below expectations, and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%. The weakness was partly structural: federal payrolls continued their decline and a healthcare strike removed tens of thousands of workers from the count. Offsetting that, the ISM services PMI surged to 56.1, its highest since July 2022.
The Fed is now caught between two conflicting forces - rate cuts risk adding fuel to energy-driven inflation, while holding steady risks tipping a fragile consumer. Expect the Fed to stay on hold well into summer.
🇪🇺 Eurozone: Energy Shock Hits at the Worst Moment
Even before the Iran strikes, the disinflation story was losing momentum, with February inflation coming in at 1.9%, above both January's reading and market expectations. The one bright spot - eurozone unemployment fell to an all-time low of 6.1% in January. But with traders now pricing more than a 50% probability of an ECB rate rise, the policy outlook has shifted dramatically in a single week.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom: Resilience Under Pressure
The UK Composite PMI, which combines manufacturing and services activity into a single measure of private sector health, came in at 53.7 in February. Any reading above 50 indicates expansion, and 53.7 represents solid momentum. House prices also rose a stronger-than-expected 1.3% year on year. The risk is energy - the UK imports a significant share of its gas, and the Office for Budget Responsibility warned the conflict could have very significant impacts on the economy. Sterling weakened to its lowest level since early December, reflecting those concerns.
🇯🇵 Japan: Gulf Dependency in Focus
Japan imports almost all of its energy from the Gulf region, making it acutely exposed to a sustained oil price shock. The yen weakened toward JPY 158, with the Finance Minister flagging currency intervention as an option. Unions are seeking a 5.94% average wage increase this year, keeping the BoJ's gradual rate normalisation path intact for now.
🇨🇳 China: Growth Ambitions Quietly Scaled Back
At the National People's Congress, China set its 2026 GDP growth target at 4.5% to 5%, the lowest since at least the 1990s, with boosting domestic demand identified as the top policy priority. February's official manufacturing PMI edged down to 49.0, remaining in contraction, while the private S&P Global survey rose to 52.1, reflecting the divide between large state-owned firms and smaller export-focused businesses.
🌐 Artificial Intelligence and Tech
The Anthropic/Pentagon standoff was the defining story of the week. The Department of War formally designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk to national security, the first time this designation has been applied to an American company. The dispute traces back to Anthropic's refusal to allow Claude to be used for fully autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of US citizens. President Trump directed all federal agencies to cease using Anthropic technology within six months. Anthropic responded by announcing it would challenge the ruling in court. The unexpected outcome - the public conflict pushed Claude to number one in the App Store across more than 20 countries, with paying subscribers doubling since the start of the year.
OpenAI then announced a deal with the Pentagon to deploy its models on classified military networks, accepting terms Anthropic refused. Elon Musk's xAI signed a similar deal for Grok. The irony - Pentagon officials acknowledged that replacing Claude, already deeply embedded in military operations through Palantir's Maven Smart System and actively used in targeting during the Iran conflict, would be technically complex. Neither Grok nor ChatGPT is considered an equivalent substitute at this stage.
On model releases, OpenAI launched GPT-5.4 with advanced reasoning, native computer-use capabilities and a one-million-token context window. DeepSeek V4, expected to be a trillion-parameter open-source multimodal model optimised for Chinese hardware, remains imminent having missed several predicted launch windows.
On infrastructure, Oracle and OpenAI cancelled plans to expand their Stargate data centre campus in Texas from 1.2 to 2 gigawatts, citing financing issues. The broader picture is an industry where capital intensity is running ahead of financing capacity, even as hyperscalers race to reduce Nvidia dependence through custom chip development.
In financial services, JPMorgan's AI technology spending is approaching $20 billion annually. Agentic AI is gaining traction with new funding for Dyna.AI and AI-executed payment pilots by Santander and Mastercard. AWS launched an AI agent platform for healthcare, and Meta is opening WhatsApp to rival chatbots in Brazil as a concession to antitrust regulators.
Get your free guide to AI
Crypto highlights
The Iran conflict was the dominant force on crypto markets this week. Bitcoin initially dropped sharply to around $63,000 when news of the US-Israeli strikes broke on the Saturday, before recovering toward $68,000 by Monday as the immediate panic subsided. The pattern confirmed what many investors have come to expect: crypto sells off on the headline and then finds its feet as the dust settles, behaving more like a risk asset than a safe haven.
One genuinely notable development was crypto's role as the only functioning market during the weekend strikes. With traditional exchanges closed, traders used decentralised platforms to price the conflict in real time, rotate out of risk, and express views on oil and volatility. The Iran weekend made a strong practical case for always-on markets that no traditional exchange can currently match.
Polkadot was the week's outlier, up 9% on the month ahead of its March 14 supply cap change, which will cut annual token issuance by more than 50%.
If you liked this newsletter, please send this link to friends, family, and colleagues and post on social media. https://insight-weekly.beehiiv.com/subscribe
Stay tuned for more insights and updates each week.