When the commander-in-chief threatens to level another country’s infrastructure, markets tend to have opinions. And right now, those opinions are splitting cleanly into two camps: hard assets up, risk assets down.
President Trump warned he would destroy Iranian infrastructure in response to any attack on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of global oil supply passes daily. The market reaction was swift and predictable. Oil surged near $87 a barrel, gold pushed toward $4,100, and everything else flinched.
Risk assets caught in the crossfire
The Nasdaq slipped about half a percent, dragging AI-adjacent tech stocks lower with it. That might not sound dramatic on its own, but the broader context matters. Markets have been trying to find stable footing for weeks, and a fresh geopolitical escalation is the kind of headwind nobody needed.
Crypto didn’t escape the blast radius either. Bitcoin dipped below $66K, marking a roughly 0.9% decline over 24 hours. Ethereum held near $1,944, actually posting a modest 0.9% gain in the same window. Solana traded around $79, also up 0.9% on the day. XRP sat at $1.15.
