Key Markets & Headlines — Friday, July 10, 2026

Daily market briefing for 2026-07-10.

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Key Markets & Headlines

Key markets and headlines for today.

The single most market-moving story this morning centers on the Federal Reserve. Chairman Kevin Warsh has announced the leadership of five task forces that will examine the central bank’s approach to key aspects of policy making, with an eye toward potentially enacting sweeping changes. The leaders of these task forces include prominent academics, former central bankers, and corporate executives. Among them are former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, former Brazil Central Bank President Arminio Fraga, former Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan, Harvard University’s Karen Dynan, and former Walmart Chief Executive Doug McMillon. Warsh said in a statement that each task force will carefully consider whether policymakers’ means and methods, analytical tools, and policy approaches can be improved upon. The goal, he said, is straightforward: to ensure the Fed is best positioned to achieve its objectives in this consequential time. This move signals the possibility of significant changes ahead for the Federal Reserve’s policy framework, communications strategy, and even its six point seven trillion dollar balance sheet.

Turning to equities and corporate news, there’s a lot happening across sectors, especially in technology, artificial intelligence, and media.

Airbnb has made its first property purchase in New York City, acquiring a forty-two thousand five hundred square foot office building in Manhattan’s Gramercy neighborhood. This comes as the company continues to lobby local and state officials for the loosening of the city’s strict restrictions on short-term rentals. Local Law 18, which took effect in 2023, enhanced enforcement of the city’s longstanding near-ban on short-term rentals and has significantly reduced the number of them operating in New York. Airbnb, which currently leases office space in lower Manhattan, said the new building will serve as a roomier gathering spot for its more than six hundred employees in the New York area.

Amazon is pushing to quickly grow volume for its U.S. delivery offering by offering lower shipping rates to prospective customers. Amazon Shipping, the company’s parcel delivery service now available to all customers, has been offering proposals with prices competitive with or lower than FedEx and UPS. Multiple experts working with shippers in negotiating and handling shipping contracts have noted that Amazon Shipping’s pricing push became more prevalent this year as it expanded its availability to non-Amazon sellers. The company is aggressively going after UPS and FedEx right now, willing to negotiate on revenue per piece to carve out market share.

In the artificial intelligence sector, former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been appointed to Anthropic’s long-term benefit trust. This oversight body is meant to keep the AI company accountable to its public mission. Bernanke will advise on topics such as the societal impact of AI, including its potential to replace white-collar jobs and concerns that rapid spending on the new technology is fueling a financial bubble. As a member of the trust, Bernanke has the ability to appoint and remove corporate board directors and advise top management on critical decisions, including those involving the risks and societal impacts of AI.

Disney is exploring making some of its streaming content available for free on Disney Plus. According to people familiar with the matter, product and tech chief Adam Smith spoke about enabling free-tier content during a streaming town hall on Thursday afternoon. This is part of an ongoing discussion about concepts to better serve fans and potentially attract new users to the platform.

Getty Images has announced new single-seat Creative and Editorial image subscriptions. These plans give independent professionals the same subscription-based access to Getty Images’ premium visuals that the world’s top media organizations and corporations have long relied on. For many smaller customers, Getty Images’ quality has been reserved for select projects, but these new subscriptions aim to give a much wider range of customers direct access to the depth of content and coverage that the world’s best organizations use every day.

Mattel shares are under pressure, sliding two point one percent ahead of the bell after a downgrade from Goldman Sachs analyst Stephen Laszczyk. He cut his recommendation on the toy maker to sell from neutral and lowered his price target to a Street-low twelve dollars from fifteen. Laszczyk described Mattel as an execution story with a higher than average degree of operational complexity over the next six to twelve months. In addition to the volatile geopolitical, macro, and consumer backdrop and competitive pressures within the toy industry, Mattel must execute against newer investment initiatives in trading cards, collectibles, and video games. While the summer 2026 movie slate includes some notable theatrical releases, Laszczyk worries that the financial benefit might not be as material as needed to drive an inflection in results, especially given dampened expectations around the Masters of the Universe franchise following a muted theatrical release this summer.

In the AI training space, Mercor is reportedly in talks to raise a funding round at a twenty billion dollar valuation. Sources say the conversations for this latest round are at early stages, though Mercor told investors it already received a term sheet at the new valuation. Founder and CEO Brendan Foody said on X that the company’s annualized revenue run rate crossed two billion dollars, a one hundred percent increase from just four months ago. Mercor also announced the acquisition of Deeptune, a company that helps train AI agents, with the entire Deeptune team joining Mercor as part of the deal.

Meta Platforms has unveiled a version of its most advanced artificial intelligence model, Muse Spark one point one, that includes a new paid tier for developers. This marks the first time Meta has charged businesses for access to its models, providing a new revenue stream. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the pricing will be very aggressive and attractive, with API pricing roughly twenty-five percent of the cost advertised by other top models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Meta will also introduce a new Meta Model API system to collect fees from developers.

At OpenAI, Fidji Simo, who oversaw much of the AI startup’s core business, is stepping down from her full-time role following a three-month medical leave. Simo will shift to being a part-time adviser to OpenAI, with her product and business responsibilities being split between President Greg Brockman, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar, and Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon.

OpenAI and Google have confirmed they have been supplying AI services to Singapore-based subsidiaries of Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent. OpenAI, after being contacted by the Financial Times, said it suspended Alibaba-affiliated users’ API access last month over concerns about illicit use. The recent block of Alibaba users followed suspected “distillation,” which was flagged to the U.S. government. OpenAI says it doesn’t allow its models to be accessed in China but permits some Chinese-owned companies to use tools in countries where safeguards can be enforced.

OpenAI is also sunsetting Atlas, the AI-powered browser it launched in October with ChatGPT at its core. Instead, it’s taking some of the agentic browsing features it tested in Atlas and redistributing them across ChatGPT’s desktop app and a Google Chrome extension. The new ChatGPT extension on Chrome gives it access to the context of the page you’re viewing, lets users ask questions about web pages, summarize content, or start longer tasks all from the browser. The ChatGPT desktop app is also being upgraded with a more robust browser that allows users to browse websites, log into accounts, download files, and interact with web pages without leaving ChatGPT.

Oracle has been downgraded by S&P Global Ratings to the lowest investment-grade rating, moving the firm to the cusp of junk status. The downgrade is due to Oracle’s growing spending on artificial intelligence. S&P said Oracle’s AI business needs significant upfront investment and long-term data center leases. While demand for AI services is strong now, competition is intense, and other tech companies pouring money into AI have greater capacity to raise capital. S&P also cited an uncertain path to profitability and a rapidly evolving industry and competitive landscape in the AI infrastructure sector.

Polymarket is seeking regulatory approval to offer margin trading in the U.S., a move that would let users bet on events with less capital upfront and help the prediction market platform attract more sophisticated traders. The company filed an application to operate as a futures commission merchant through its affiliate, Coming Home GBA LLC, according to a July third filing with the National Futures Association. Polymarket must also obtain approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for changes to its rulebook that would allow non-fully collateralized trading.

Paramount Skydance management may not have the experience needed to manage the large amount of debt that will come from a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, according to Arete Research. Arete downgraded Paramount to sell from neutral and cut the price target to two dollars — the lowest among Wall Street analysts. The research note pointed out that media mega-mergers are tough, particularly from a historical standpoint, and the tie-up between Paramount and Warner Bros. is the most-levered media deal yet. It’s unclear that management has the experience to run a highly levered balance sheet.

Starbucks is developing in-house tools with the help of artificial intelligence that could replace some software applications it now buys from companies such as Microsoft and IBM. The coffee chain is building alternatives to a Microsoft system that tracks inventory and an IBM tool that manages maintenance, according to an internal presentation. Starbucks spends about four hundred million dollars a year on software alone, and Chief Technology Officer Anand Varadarajan told workers there are clear opportunities to reduce that spend.

Tencent is in talks to become Manus’ largest shareholder as investors seek alternatives after Beijing ordered Meta to unwind its two billion dollar acquisition of the AI startup. Tencent, together with Manus’ original investors, is planning to buy the company back from Meta for no less than two billion dollars. Meta announced the acquisition of Manus in December to bolster its own work on agentic AI, but China launched a review in April into whether the deal violated investment rules.

Turning to macroeconomic and policy developments, we’ve already covered the major news from the Federal Reserve. Shifting to Europe, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has spent recent months trying to lock in reform agreements within his coalition ahead of parliament’s summer recess and ahead of September’s state elections in eastern Germany, where the far-right AfD is close to capturing at least one state parliament. By some measures, Merz has been successful, with coalition leaders striking agreements on overhauls to the pension, tax, and health insurance schemes meant in large part to bring down costs for employees. However, to many voters and some business leaders, the measures come across as incremental and anemic — hardly the kind of soaring promise of change that would stop the far right. Only thirteen percent of Germans are satisfied with the chancellor’s work, according to the latest benchmark ARD-DeutschlandTrend poll, the lowest rating for a sitting chancellor in the survey’s nearly thirty-year history.

In the United Kingdom, Andy Burnham has taken another step towards becoming the next Labour leader and prime minister. The vast majority of Labour MPs have nominated him to replace Sir Keir Starmer. Burnham’s Labour leadership bid has been backed by three hundred twenty-two out of four hundred three Labour MPs, leaving him just one short of the three hundred twenty-three needed before it is mathematically impossible for a rival to run against him. If no one else enters the contest, as expected, Burnham will be declared Labour leader next week before taking office as prime minister on July twentieth.

In Peru, the central bank held its key interest rate at four point two five percent for a tenth straight month on Thursday, betting that an uptick in inflation will prove temporary. The decision matched all twelve forecasts in a Bloomberg survey of analysts. Peru targets annual inflation of two percent, plus or minus one percentage point. Policymakers have said that inflation will slow toward its target as temporary pressures dissipate, although they also warned of longer-term threats posed by global conflict and the weather.

On the commodities front, gold steadied as investors assessed the fallout from renewed fighting in the Middle East and the prospects for interest-rate hikes to combat inflation. For gold traders, the flare-up in fighting increases the likelihood of the Federal Reserve keeping borrowing costs higher for longer to deal with the inflationary impact of elevated energy prices. Minutes of the Fed’s June meeting released this week showed some policymakers said there was a case for raising rates, which were ultimately left on hold. Central bank buying remains an important support for bullion, with the People’s Bank of China purchasing more gold in June to extend its longest buying streak since at least 2015.

In geopolitics, Israel has shared intelligence with the United States that Iran had recently devised a new plan to assassinate President Donald Trump, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The warning came this week, adding another layer of tension as a ceasefire deal between the countries comes under strain. Another source said the U.S. had picked up a steady drumbeat of intelligence in recent weeks about possible plans to assassinate Trump, but the warning from Israel was new and concerned a specific plot. Other American officials suggested the Israeli report could be an effort to sway Trump’s decision-making as he weighs whether to intensify American military action against Iran.

In the semiconductor sector, ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT, is emerging as one of the world’s most important semiconductor makers, poised to shake up the one trillion dollar memory-chip market and accelerate Beijing’s ambitions in artificial intelligence. CXMT has become China’s best option to end its reliance on foreign memory chips at a time of severe shortages. The company is launching the country’s biggest initial public offering of 2026 next week as CXMT Corp., seeking upwards of four point three billion dollars after revenue showed industry-leading seven-fold growth in the first half.

Moving to event-driven news, CCC Intelligent Solutions, a provider of software and AI-powered workflow tools, is exploring a sale of the company. The Chicago-based company has hired Morgan Stanley to advise on a sale process and has reached out to prospective buyers, including private equity firms. CCC has explored a sale previously, with Reuters reporting in 2023 that the company was considering strategic options including a potential sale after attracting takeover interest, though no transaction materialized.

Researchers at JPMorgan have built an array of AI-powered investing agents that shift between stocks and bonds depending on changing market conditions. In backtests spanning the past two decades, the best-performing system topped a traditional sixty-forty portfolio by zero point seven percentage point a year with lower volatility, while also beating JPMorgan’s own rules-based market regime model. However, the results are based on historical simulations rather than live investing, and JPMorgan warns against treating them as proof that AI can consistently outperform markets.

The startup PrismML has announced it has shrunk down Qwen three point six, an open-source large language model developed by Chinese internet giant Alibaba, to run on an iPhone seventeen Pro. The model has twenty-seven billion parameters, which are roughly similar to the synapses in a brain and can help determine the complexity of the data a model can process. PrismML uses a mathematical trick to shrink the Qwen three point six model to a fraction of its original size. While shrinking models typically results in worse performance, the company claims its technique for miniaturizing AI model sizes doesn’t hinder their performance.

Qiagen is drawing early takeover interest from firms including EQT and Advent, according to people familiar with the matter. KKR is also among private equity firms that have expressed interest in Qiagen. The company could attract more buyout firms, as well as strategic players, as the process unfolds.

SK Hynix has raised twenty-six point five billion dollars in its American depositary receipt offering, as the South Korean memory chipmaker powered through volatility to deliver the largest ever U.S. first-time share sale by a foreign company. The company sold one hundred seventy-seven point nine million ADRs for one hundred forty-nine dollars each. At twenty-six point five billion dollars, the offering tops Alibaba Group Holding’s U.S. debut to become the third biggest listing in history. SK Hynix’s U.S. offering gives the world’s top supplier of high-bandwidth memory a powerful fundraising channel, tapping investors looking for more ways to play the red-hot artificial intelligence infrastructure trade.

Now, let’s take a look at some notable charts and data points from the day.

The spread between tech and energy in equities has reached one hundred eight billion dollars since the release of ChatGPT, according to Strategas. This highlights the ongoing dominance of technology shares over energy stocks in terms of market capitalization growth since the AI boom began.

Looking at the top twenty contributors to S&P five hundred second quarter net income growth, Strategas data shows that a handful of large companies continue to drive the bulk of earnings expansion for the index, underscoring the concentration of profit growth among mega-cap names.

On the consumer side, the Atlanta Fed Wage Growth Tracker continues to show robust wage gains, reflecting ongoing tightness in the labor market and supporting consumer spending trends.

And in New York, congestion pricing has pulled roughly one hundred forty thousand vehicles a day off Manhattan streets, according to Apollo. This significant reduction in traffic is a direct result of the city’s efforts to manage congestion and improve air quality through pricing mechanisms.

That wraps up today’s key markets and headlines.

Thanks for listening.