The Briefing

Brent crude settled at $103.14 despite the largest strategic reserve release in IEA history and a waiver on sanctioned Russian oil at sea. The market has concluded that emergency tools built for pipeline outages and hurricanes cannot offset the closure of a strait that carried 20 million barrels per day.

• IEA coordinated a record 400-million-barrel release from member nations' strategic reserves, more than doubling the 2022 Ukraine-crisis release
• Only five ships per day now transit the Strait of Hormuz, down from an average of 138 before the conflict
• JPMorgan estimates the global shortfall at 16 million barrels per day; emergency releases historically peak at 1.4 million per day
• At current drawdown rates, the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve contribution alone requires 120 days to deliver — with no plan announced for what follows

The Treasury Department issued a 30-day general license allowing global purchases of roughly 128 million barrels of Russian oil at sea — one week after intelligence confirmed Russia is providing Iran with satellite imagery of American troop positions. European allies condemned the move; Moscow welcomed it as vindication.

• General License 134 broadened an India-only waiver issued March 5 to cover all countries, suspending the US oil price cap on Russian crude already loaded on vessels
• European Commission President von der Leyen said 'now was not the time to relax sanctions'; Germany's Merz called it 'wrong'
• Zelenskyy warned the waiver could provide Russia approximately $10 billion for its war effort
• Oil prices remained above $100 per barrel after the announcement, suggesting the market views the measure as insufficient to alter the supply picture

Chief Warrant Officer Arnaud Frion was killed when Shahed drones struck a joint Peshmerga-French training base near Erbil. The death exposes the growing gap between European forces' counterterrorism mandates and the theatre-wide conflict now engulfing them.

• Six French soldiers were wounded alongside Frion; Iran-aligned Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed responsibility
• Italy accelerated a partial withdrawal from the region the same day France deployed the Charles de Gaulle carrier strike group
• European forces in Kurdistan operate under an anti-ISIS mandate dating to 2015 — a coalition built for a different war
• Two European NATO members are now pulling in opposite directions within 48 hours of being hit, with no collective European decision on Iraq in sight

Israel struck the Zrarieh Bridge and expanded airstrikes into previously untargeted Beirut neighborhoods, the first acknowledged targeting of civilian infrastructure in the current campaign. Defence Minister Katz framed infrastructure destruction as a price Lebanon's government would pay for failing to disarm Hezbollah.

• At least 773 killed including over 100 children, with more than 800,000 displaced in eleven days
• Israeli evacuation orders now cover approximately 1,470 square kilometres — 14 percent of Lebanon's territory
• The Soufan Center found the IRGC, not Hezbollah's political leadership, exercises effective control over the group's military decisions
• Lebanon outlawed Hezbollah's military wing on March 2 but is being held responsible for an armed force whose chain of command runs through Tehran

A refueling tanker went down in western Iraq during a combat support sortie, with evidence pointing to a mid-air collision with a second KC-135 that landed in Israel with severe tail damage. Four manned US aircraft have now been lost in two weeks — none to enemy fire.

• CENTCOM confirmed the crash was not caused by hostile or friendly fire; the surviving tanker landed missing roughly 40 percent of its vertical stabilizer
• Total US military fatalities in the conflict: 13, with seven killed by enemy fire and six in this operational incident
• The KC-135 fleet averages over 66 years old and lacks ejection seats
• All four manned aircraft losses since February 28 — three F-15Es to Kuwaiti friendly fire, one KC-135 to apparent mid-air collision — have been self-inflicted

The University of Michigan's preliminary March index fell to 55.5, in the second percentile of the survey's history. The pre-conflict and post-conflict halves of the same survey read like two different countries, with the Iran war erasing all gains recorded before February 28.

• Year-ahead inflation expectations stalled at 3.4 percent, ending six months of consecutive declines
• Among post-conflict respondents, 42.6 percent expected higher gas prices, versus 10.0 percent of those surveyed before the strikes
• Q4 GDP was revised down to 0.7 percent annualised growth — half the initial estimate
• High-income consumers, whose spending sustained the economy through 2023-2024, registered sharp drops alongside lower-income households for the first time

The largest housing affordability package in three decades cleared the Senate with rare bipartisan support, barring institutional investors with 350+ homes from purchasing more. The headline provision targets an entity class controlling 0.35 percent of US housing stock; the structural provisions on zoning and environmental review are the ones that could actually move supply.

• The 303-page bill streamlines environmental reviews, modernises manufactured housing definitions, and creates zoning reform incentives
• Violations of the investor purchase ban carry penalties of up to $1 million or three times the purchase price
• The House version, passed 390-9 in February, lacks the investor ban; conference negotiations expected to take weeks
• Trump reportedly told Speaker Johnson that 'no one gives a [bleep] about housing' and has threatened to withhold his signature until Congress passes voter ID legislation

Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, released roughly two and a half years early from an 11-year terrorism sentence, opened fire in an ROTC classroom, killing Lt. Col. Brandon Shah. The FBI is investigating the shooting as an act of terrorism. ROTC students subdued and killed the gunman.

• Jalloh pleaded guilty in 2016 to attempting to provide material support to ISIS; prosecutors had requested 20 years
• He was released early after completing a drug treatment programme that typically renders terrorism convicts ineligible for sentence reduction
• An ROTC student killed the gunman with a knife; law enforcement confirmed the shooter dead within ten minutes of the first 911 call
• The federal system currently possesses no validated mechanism for distinguishing genuine deradicalisation from performed compliance

President Diaz-Canel publicly acknowledged US contacts for the first time and released 51 prisoners, while the island generates barely half its electricity demand after three months without oil. The actual negotiations reportedly run through Raul Castro's 41-year-old grandson, who oversees the military conglomerate controlling 35-40 percent of Cuba's economy.

• No fuel shipments have reached Cuba since December, after the US cut off Venezuelan oil following the January 3 military operation
• Generation stands at 1,180 megawatts against demand of 2,250; over 115 bakeries have reverted to firewood
• Secretary of State Rubio reportedly met secretly with Raul Castro's grandson at a Caribbean summit last month
• Three months without oil has brought Havana to a table it spent years insisting did not exist

Internal benchmarks showed Meta's Avocado model trailing Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic in reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks. The company that spent three years positioning open-source AI as its identity has now delayed its first proprietary model twice and discussed renting a rival's technology — while planning to spend up to $135 billion on AI infrastructure this year.

• Avocado was pushed from mid-March to at least May, the second delay after an original late-2025 target
• Meta leadership reportedly discussed temporarily licensing Google's Gemini to bridge the gap
• Meta's 2026 capex guidance of $115-135 billion represents an 88 percent increase over 2025
• Unlike Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, Meta lacks a cloud computing business to monetise its AI infrastructure directly

Shantanu Narayen announced his departure alongside record Q1 results — revenue up 12 percent, every estimate beaten — and the stock still dropped 9 percent. The market is not pricing leadership transition risk. It is pricing the possibility that per-seat creative software licensing does not survive the era of autonomous AI tools.

• Adobe shares have declined roughly 38 percent from their 52-week high, compressing the P/E ratio to approximately 16 times
• Figma, which Adobe tried to acquire for $20 billion before regulators blocked the deal, now carries a valuation of approximately $57 billion
• Firefly's annualised revenue tripled; freemium users surged 50 percent to over 80 million
• The successor inherits a company generating record cash flow from a business model the market has decided may be structurally impaired