Defense Secretary Hegseth said the ceasefire holds and two ships safely transited with destroyer escorts. Oil fell. The Nasdaq hit a new all-time high. The S&P rose. Markets chose the optimistic read.

The data told a different story. Gas hit $4.48 per gallon, its highest since summer 2022. Diesel is within 16 cents of an all-time high. US fuel demand is down 8% year over year. That is not a sentiment reading. It is actual gallon counts falling at pumps across the country.

ISM Services came in slightly below estimates. New orders fell sharply. Services prices stayed elevated. The labor market is not breaking but it is splitting. Hiring spiked overall while fuel-exposed sectors are the ones cutting.

The market is pricing ceasefire durability. Fuel demand down 8% is a hard consumption number, not a soft signal. If it shows up in April retail spending: consumer discretionary gives back the month's gains, travel names face a second guidance cut cycle, and volume-dependent retail loses its Q2 revenue assumption. If it doesn't: the ceasefire read holds another week. The April retail sales print is the trigger.

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Palantir (PLTR) reported record revenue and its fastest growth since going public. US commercial revenue more than doubled. Government AI spending accelerated. Full-year guidance was raised. The stock fell 7%.

The problem is simple. At Monday's close, Palantir traded at 98 times forward earnings. At that price, analysts say revenue growth above 70% is required just to hold the stock flat. Even a blowout quarter could not clear that bar convincingly enough.

The earnings template is now fully visible. Alphabet (GOOGL) proved demand exceeded supply and went up. Meta (META) raised spending without a matching revenue bridge and fell. Palantir beat every line and raised guidance at a 98x multiple and fell. The market rewards beats that change the fundamental story enough to justify the price. Palantir's results were strong but not transformative enough at that valuation.

Executives used the phrase "no-slop zone" 17 times on the call to describe their data governance edge. The positioning is real. The stock had already priced it.

The government AI and defense spending thesis is confirmed by the results. The entry point is the problem at 98x forward earnings. Own the thesis. Wait for the multiple to compress before sizing in.

IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva said the quick-war assumption is in the rear view mirror. The IMF is now running its adverse scenario. Global GDP growth cut to 2.5% from 3.1%. Global inflation raised to 5.4% from 4.4%. She said governments subsidizing fuel are throwing gasoline on the fire by keeping demand high while supply has shrunk.

The IMF is the world's most conservative institutional forecaster. When it formally abandons its base case, that is a structural signal, not a warning. The medium-term probability distribution just shifted.

UK gilt markets are pricing the same shift. The UK 30-year gilt yield hit its highest level since 1998. Before the war, UK markets priced rate cuts. Now they price nearly three Bank of England hikes this year. That is the most dramatic rate repricing of any major central bank since the war began. The mechanism is direct. The UK imports nearly all its energy. Higher import costs raise inflation. A credible central bank has to respond.

The IMF moving to its adverse scenario resets analyst models globally. Energy infrastructure with multi-year contracts and defense companies with government backlogs reprice structurally upward. Duration assets absorb the downside.

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PayPal (PYPL) fell sharply after CEO Enrique Lores said the company is falling behind and announced plans to cut 20% of its workforce over the next two to three years. This came alongside a clean earnings beat. The company beat estimates and simultaneously said it cannot sustain its current cost structure in an AI-era payments business.

Coinbase (COIN) separately announced cutting 14% of staff, also citing AI. CEO Brian Armstrong said engineers are completing in days what used to take entire teams weeks. He described the goal as building Coinbase lean, fast, and AI-native.

Two major fintech companies, same day, same stated reason. PayPal's cuts are offensive. Less spending on legacy infrastructure, more on AI. Coinbase's are defensive. Lower crypto revenue with less headcount needed to run the platform.

Beats paired with layoff announcements historically precede margin expansion. The market is selling the headline. If revenue holds and headcount falls, free cash flow improves. Watch PayPal's Q2 margin guidance for confirmation the restructuring is working.

Intel (INTC) jumped 12% after Bloomberg reported Apple (AAPL) is exploring using Intel and Samsung to manufacture chips for US devices. The US government owns roughly 10% of Intel after last year's equity conversion. An Apple contract confirms the domestic chip production thesis is operationally real, and every name in that supply chain reprices on the same session it's announced.

HSBC (HSBC) took a $400 million hit tied to an alleged private credit fraud. A UK mortgage lender collapsed after allegedly pledging the same collateral to multiple lenders. HSBC said it relied on outside due diligence and will tighten procedures. This is the third distinct expression of private credit stress in as many weeks. Direct lending funds and business development companies that rely on third-party collateral verification face the same exposure. Ares Capital and Blue Owl Capital are the two largest publicly traded expressions of that structure. If the fraud pattern is broader than one lender, those names feel it first.

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The market is pricing the ceasefire and the earnings cycle. The IMF is pricing a longer war and a harder inflation path. Those two views cannot coexist indefinitely. 

AMD reports after the close. Friday's jobs report answers whether the labor market is holding or starting to crack. One of those two closes the gap between what the market is pricing and what the data is showing.