By Thierry Hasse, Chief Investment Officer
Elevage Partners | July 13, 2026
The Market’s Shrug
The ceasefire ended Tuesday. President Donald Trump said so himself, then backed it with two nights of strikes that hit roughly 170 targets across Iran, while Tehran fired on U.S. bases in Bahrain and Kuwait and struck commercial vessels near the Strait of Hormuz. Qatar and Pakistan are shuttling between Washington and Tehran to reopen talks, and Trump has said negotiations continue even as he insists the truce itself is over.
In our assessment, that recalibration reflects something structural, not just fatigue. The International Energy Agency last week projected global oil demand will fall in 2026, the first annual decline since the pandemic, as elevated prices and supply disruption pushed refiners, airlines, and petrochemical buyers to use less. Asia’s import-dependent economies drove much of the pullback. That doesn’t make the conflict low-stakes. It does mean the market’s capacity to absorb it, for now, is real.
Frozen by Design
Rates offer no comparable resolution. Bond investors are demanding more to hold government debt right now. The 10-year Treasury yield closed the week near 4.56%, close to its high for 2026, as the reflex reaction to renewed Iran tensions pushed yields up alongside oil.
Mortgage rates followed, with the 30-year fixed hovering around 6.5%. In practical terms, a family that could afford a home at 2021’s rates now qualifies for meaningfully less house, and many current owners sit on mortgages well below market, discouraging a move even when life circumstances call for one. The result is a housing market frozen at the transaction level: fewer homes changing hands, and prices adjusting slowly rather than snapping.
That slow adjustment is most visible in Florida and the broader Southeast, where the sharpest post-pandemic price gains are now giving back ground gradually rather than all at once, a function of thin transaction volume more than a rush to sell. We see this less as a housing crisis than as a market waiting: for the Fed’s next move, for oil and inflation to settle, for sellers who don’t have to sell to decide it’s worth it.
Earned or Borrowed
U.S. equities managed a gain for the week, but the composition underneath tells the real story. Speculative excess is being sorted from durable earnings power in real time, often within the same sector. SpaceX, still working through its post-IPO hangover after peaking above $225 in June, continues drifting lower as investors question a valuation built on a $26 trillion addressable market that has yet to show up in a single quarter of results. Meta moved the other direction, jumping roughly 15% on the week, its best since early 2024, as investors credited management’s progress converting large language model investment into measurable ad-revenue growth (33% year-over-year in the first quarter, accelerating for three straight quarters) rather than treating AI spending as an act of faith.
We expect this pattern — sharp divergence between AI narrative and AI monetization — to persist and likely sharpen as more companies report. The debate over which AI-related valuations are earned and which are borrowed against the future is not resolving. It’s just moving stock by stock.
More Meetings, Not a Different Path
This week brings the test that matters most: earnings season opens Tuesday with JPMorgan and BlackRock, followed by Wells Fargo and Citigroup, setting an early tone for how corporate America is actually performing versus how it’s being priced.
June’s inflation report lands Tuesday as well, and while a hot or soft print will move markets in the moment, we don’t expect it to sway the Fed’s next decision much either way. New Chair Kevin Warsh, seven weeks into the job, spent last week naming outside experts to lead five task forces studying the Fed’s communications, its balance sheet, its data, and its inflation framework. It’s a serious list of names. It is also, by design, a multi-month process before it becomes a policy.
For a chair who campaigned on “regime change,” the first tangible output looks like more meetings and more white papers, not a different path for rates. We understand the instinct to want more clarity from Washington on rates, oil, and the Fed all at once. Our approach continues to rest on the discipline of matching portfolios to your goals and time horizon, not on correctly guessing which headline resolves first.