The stock market’s soaring tech-led rally may have finally met its match as an old foe returned to the fore.

U.S. Treasury yields climbed to the highest levels in nearly a year in overnight trading, matching a selloff in global fixed-income markets tied to rising inflation pressures, elevated crude prices, and a lackluster end to President Donald Trump’s two-day China summit.

Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. doesn’t need the Strait of Hormuz open “at all,” following a series of discussions with President Xi Jinping that offered little support for U.S. efforts in the Gulf region, added upward pressure to global crude prices—taking this week’s gain to around 9%, that layered across markets in Asia and Europe.

In the U.S., 2-year notes vaulted north of 4%, 10-year paper topped 4.5%, and 30-year bonds held firmly north of the 5% mark in early Friday trading, levels that suggest a flare-up of concerns in the bond market that are powerful enough to hold down equity markets ahead of Nvidia’s first-quarter earnings next week.

Wall Street looks caught off guard by the yield surge, and the lack of detail on Trump’s China visit beyond his insistence of “fantastic trade deals” that he declined to articulate. 

Beijing’s more measured assessment of reaching “a series of new common understandings” was also bereft of examples after a week of face-to-face meetings and months of preparation.

The truth may lie somewhere in between, but the bond market appears to have the final word for the moment. And if Treasury bond yields extend their upward climb, it will be exceedingly difficult for stocks to resume their torrid pace of second-quarter gains.

—Martin Baccardax

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Bipartisan support for the crypto industry’s biggest legislative priority helped a Senate committee approve the Clarity Act, a bill intended to clarify regulation of digital assets. But there’s still a long way to go before it becomes law, and even a small hiccup could derail that journey.

• The Senate Banking Committee voted 15-9 to advance the bill, which would place most crypto trading under the oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Coinbase and other trading platforms have fought hard for such a move, seeing it as a step to broader institutional adoption of crypto such as Bitcoin.

• But the bill has been stalled by a dispute between banks and crypto firms. Recently Coinbase and some other trading platforms have been paying yields to customers on dollar-pegged stablecoins, something banks say threaten their deposit business. At first they fought to prohibit them, then they compromised.

• The compromise allows “rewards” payments when customers use crypto but not on idle deposits. While committee Republicans could have approved the bill on a party-line vote, two Democrats also supported it. To avoid a Senate filibuster, the bill needs at least seven Democrats when the full Senate votes.

• Some otherwise crypto-friendly Democrats vow to oppose the bill if it doesn’t include an ethics provision to keep President Donald Trump and his family from making money off crypto. The Trump family has already made millions on such ventures, and the White House has argued that they aren’t a conflict.

What’s Next: The two Banking Committee Democrats who voted in favor of the bill—Sens. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.) and Angela Alsobrooks (D., Md.)—said it doesn’t guarantee their final approval. But Thursday’s outcome increases the chance of a floor vote before August, before everyone shifts to midterm election mode.

—Joe Light

President Xi Jinping’s warning to President Trump on Taiwan underscores the island’s importance to investors. Conflict over Taiwan, which Xi warned could come if the U.S. and China didn’t handle it properly, risks an unprecedented global economic shock, with $30 trillion in market value on the line.

• That’s because it’s home to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, or TSMC, maker of 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. Apple and Nvidia are its two biggest customers, accounting for almost 40% of sales. TSMC has a market value of $1.9 trillion, and Apple and Nvidia combined are $9.9 trillion.

• Other major chip makers are big customers, too, including Intel, AMD, Broadcom, and Qualcomm, representing another $3.5 trillion in combined market value. Chip customer clients are next, including Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Oracle, another $13 trillion on the line if TSMC gets caught in conflict.

• TSMC is expected to spend $55 billion on new plants and equipment in 2026. That’s close to Intel’s expected $58 billion in total revenue. A lot of that money flows to equipment makers such as ASML, Applied Materials, and Lam Research, representing another $1 trillion in market value.

• All of those companies are worth a combined $30 trillion, about half the S&P 500’s market value. And it doesn’t include companies such as SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, which depend heavily on the rise of AI computing. Those three are worth another roughly $3 trillion combined.

What’s Next: A good portion of the U.S. stock market runs through Taiwan in some way or another. To be sure, TSMC and others, such as Intel, are trying to diversify capacity outside of the island, but that process hasn’t really made a dent in the industry structure yet. 

—Al Root

President Trump’s summit with China’s leader Xi Jinping might yield some long-awaited business for Boeing, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy the market. The plane maker’s stock tumbled on Thursday, even though Trump said a big order from China could be coming.

• Shares of the commercial aircraft maker were up in early trading, but the gains faded. The stock closed Thursday 4.7% lower, while the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average both gained about 0.8%.

• Trump told Fox News on Thursday that a 200-plane order from China could be coming. That was after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC he expects “large Boeing orders” from China.

• The big order is good news, but investors were expecting way more than 200 planes. The most commonly floated figure was 500.

• Still, 300 planes won’t make or break Boeing. It has a lot of business to catch up on, with more than 6,800 unfilled jet orders. Boeing is trying to get build rates higher after struggling for years with internal design and manufacturing issues. It’s why the stock is down roughly 45% from its early 2019 record high.

What’s Next: China remains an important market for Boeing. The country hasn’t ordered a new 737 in years. Its airlines have been relatively quiet in the commercial aircraft acquisition market since the Covid-19 pandemic.

—Al Root and George Glover

Cerebras’s new stock soared 89% on its first day of trading, setting the stage for a spate of AI-related initial public offerings this year. The company’s chips can quickly perform the heavy duty mathematics of AI computing, and CEO Andrew Feldman plans to serve the biggest frontier models on earth.

Cerebras eliminates longstanding bottlenecks between computing and memory by putting both on the same chip. The approach works well for small AI models. OpenAI uses it for a small model, and it runs very quickly. But it hasn’t been a good fit for the larger models that need Nvidia’s high-end servers.

• CEO Andrew Feldman told Barron’s they’ll be moving beyond that limitation in the next six to eight weeks. Feldman said they’re already hosting larger models privately for OpenAI and others. “Still blisteringly fast,” he said. “Still 15 to 18 times faster than the competition.”

• Cerebras sells servers that hold its chips, and also rents them out in the cloud. Though cloud services were just 30% of 2025 sales, it’s where the company’s business model is headed. It had a backlog of $24.6 billion at the end of last year, and over $20 billion of that was a single cloud deal with OpenAI.

• The IPO was the biggest of 2026 so far, giving Cerebras a valuation of $55 billion. The stock opened at $350, nearly double its IPO price. It’s a gauge of demand for new tech companies—and those with an AI component, like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is becoming more of an AI play.

What’s Next: A solid start for Cerebras and SpaceX in the aftermarket could make way for even more massive tech IPOs this year, such as Databricks, design software firm Canva, mobile payments leader Stripe, predictions market Kalshi, ChatGPT owner OpenAI, and Claude developer Anthropic. 

—Adam Levine and Paul R. La Monica