The Open Bell — Ep. 024 — 24 Jul 2026

Today on The Open Bell: Oil crossed $100 a barrel overnight because Houthi rebels in Yemen set fire to a Saudi tanker in the Red Sea, and if you're wondering what that has to do with your petrol bill, the answer is: quite a lot, quite soon. Alphabet beat its revenue forecast and still got punished by markets, because it told investors it plans to spend $205 billion on AI this year and Wall Street's patience for "trust us, the payoff is coming" is running thin. America is now twelve nights into airstrikes on Iran, the president is hinting publicly at something much larger, and with oil already above $100, the global economy is operating with almost no margin for this to get worse, and it might. If today's episode was useful, a quick five-star rating helps other people find the show. Hosted by Alex Monroe. New episodes every weekday morning at theopenbell.co Not investment advice. For informational purposes only. --- Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Brent Crude Tops $100 After Houthis Strike Two Saudi Tankers 03:21 Nasdaq Tumbles 2.15% as Alphabet and Tesla AI Spend Alarms W 06:01 Trump Threatens Massive Iran Strike; US Completes 12th Night 07:56 Closing thoughts

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Good morning. It's Friday, 24th July, 2026, and this is the Open Bell. I'm Alex Monroe. Oil crossed $100 a barrel last night. Let's get into what that actually means for you. Brent crude, the global benchmark price for oil, closed above $100 a barrel for the first time in nearly eight weeks. Not because of a refinery fire, not because of a supply deal collapsing in Vienna, because Houthi rebels in Yemen fired missiles and drones at two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, hitting one of them hard enough to start a fire on board. All crew reported safe. The tankers, the Intelia and the Layla are now symbols of something that's been building all week and just broke into triple digits. The numbers, Brent closed up about 6.5% at just over $100 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate, the US equivalent, gained around 6% to settle just over $92. And here is the figure that should stop you. Oil is up more than 30% in July alone. One month. What the Houthis did wasn't just an attack on two ships, it was an enforcement action. Saudi Arabia had been quietly rerouting its tankers through the Red Sea, using the Bab El Mandeb Strait as a workaround after Hormuz traffic became too dangerous. Yesterday's strikes were a message that the workaround is now close too. Five Saudi tankers, reverse course in the Red Sea after those strikes. That's not incidental. That's a blockade functioning exactly as intended. The destination of most of those Saudi exports is India and China, two of the world's biggest oil consumers. Disrupting that flow is not a regional inconvenience. It's a global supply event. Goldman Sachs now forecasts Brent above $120 a barrel by the fourth quarter if disruptions continue. RBC Capital Markets is warning about a worst case scenario near the 2022 highs, around $128. The JP Morgan counter argument is that OPEC Plus, the group of major oil producing nations that coordinates output, holds roughly 5 million barrels per day of spare capacity, enough to absorb Saudi disruptions if the conflict stays contained. That's a reasonable point, but spare capacity takes time to deploy, tanker routes take time to reroute, and right now the conflict is not staying contained. For your petrol bill, this is not abstract. A sustained Brent above $100 typically adds 15 to 25 cents per liter at the pump within a matter of weeks. That's not a rounding error on your monthly budget, it's a grocery bill. It's a commute that costs noticeably more than it did in June. President Trump added his own accelerant yesterday, telling Axios he was considering a large-scale attack on Iran and warning that the U.S. would hold Tehran responsible for future Houthi strikes. Markets don't love uncertainty. They absolutely hate that particular combination of words from a sitting president. The last time a sustained Houthi campaign drove anything like this, it was January 2024. Red Sea tanker strikes pushed Brent above $80 and raised global shipping costs by over 150% within weeks. We're now well past $80, and the shipping disruption is arguably more severe. Oil at $100 is not a number from the news. It's the price already baked into the next delivery of goods that had to travel by sea, and the fuel that drove them to the port. The oil story sent a charge through everything else yesterday, and Wall Street's tech giants didn't help. The NASDAQ fell about 2.25% to just over $25,000, its worst single day in a month. The SP 500 dropped just over 1% to roughly $7,400. The Dow shed just over 500 points. The trigger was earnings. Alphabet, Google's parent company, reported second quarter revenue of just under $120 billion, comfortably ahead of forecasts. Google Cloud grew 82% year on year, by most measures, a strong quarter. And then the company told investors it planned to spend between $195 billion and $205 billion on capital infrastructure this year, up $15 billion from previous guidance, with $45 billion spent in the second quarter alone. Free cash flow, the actual money left over after a business pays its bills, turned negative. The stock fell 7%. Tesla was worse. Shares fell 14% after the company reported its first quarter of negative free cash flow in more than two years. A deficit of just over $1 billion, reversing roughly $1.5 billion of positive cash flow from the prior quarter. That's a company burning cash, not generating it. Here's what the market is actually saying. It's not that AI is a bad investment. Google Cloud's operating margin, the percentage of revenue that becomes profit after running costs, expanded from about 21% to nearly 36% year on year. That's the spending working. But Wall Street wants the returns faster. It wants to see the cash register ring loudly enough to justify balance sheets being stretched this dramatically. The patience for trust us, it'll compound is thinning. The comparison that keeps coming up is Amazon's investment in AWS, its cloud business, between roughly 2013 and 2015, when analysts asked the same questions about returns that never seemed to arrive until suddenly they did and cloud became the company's dominant profit engine. That parallel is doing a lot of work right now for the bulls. Whether it holds depends on whether AI demand keeps scaling the way cloud did. And that's genuinely not settled. What this means practically, if your pension or retirement account is heavily weighted toward US technology stocks, yesterday hurt. Not catastrophically, but noticeably. And the question hanging over the next set of earnings from Microsoft, Meta, Amazon is whether the market rewards spending at this scale or continues to demand faster proof. Alphabet is committing $205 billion to AI infrastructure this year. That's more than Portugal's entire annual economic output. The stock fell 7% anyway because the market decided the returns aren't coming fast enough. 12 nights. That's how long the United States military has now been striking targets inside Iran. Missile storage facilities, drone production sites, coastal surveillance infrastructure. Each night a new set of targets. And yesterday, per the Axios interview published on July 23rd, President Trump said he was close to deciding on a much larger offensive and that forces were, in his words, all set. Iran responded by warning of retaliatory strikes on U.S. linked energy infrastructure across the region. That's a direct threat to assets beyond the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway handling roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil. It's the warning that takes a regional conflict and stretches it towards something with genuinely global supply chain consequences. The diplomatic counterweight. Qatari and Pakistani mediators are reportedly active in back channel talks, and there's a credible minority view that Trump's public statements are negotiating leverage rather than a genuine and pre-strike announcement. That's possible, but markets don't price on what might be happening in private. They price on what the president says publicly, what the military confirms on the record, and what a drone strike on a tanker looks like on a newsfeed. The March 2022 parallel is the right one. Russia's invasion of Ukraine sent Brent to nearly $130 within two weeks and triggered a 10% correction in the SP 500. Central banks were forced to accelerate rate hikes to manage the inflation wave. We are not there yet. But the architecture is similar, and we're moving in that direction. Wells Fargo's senior global market strategist put it plainly this week. Oil and petrol at current trajectories will pressure consumers and force central banks to take inflation more seriously again, potentially meaning rate rises where markets had expected cuts. Twelve nights of strikes, a president signaling a major escalation, oil above $100, and central banks watching inflation expectations inch upward. This is not background noise anymore. It is a central fact of global markets heading into August. So that's the week that was. Oil crossed $100, the AI spending arms race alarmed investors who thought the returns would come sooner, and the US-Iran conflict moved into territory that has no obvious off ramp. What connects all three is the same thing. A war is reshaping every major economic calculation right now. Fuel costs, inflation, interest rates, and the pace at which AI investment can actually pay off. The number to watch next week is the Federal Reserve's July 29th and 30th meeting. With oil above $100 and inflation expectations rising, the Fed faces a harder conversation than markets had priced in a month ago. If you want today's numbers in writing, all of them, in one place, the newsletter is free and it's linked in the show notes. That's the Open Bell. I'm Alex Monroe. Have a sharp morning.