The war widened and crude fell anyway. Somebody bought a lot of yen.

The war got bigger Thursday and the oil price went down. A heavy wave of US strikes hit Iran, the conflict pulled in a new country when a drone struck two gas vessels at an Egyptian port, and by Friday morning Iran's Revolutionary Guard was claiming a retaliatory attack on a US base in Kuwait, a claim still fresh and unconfirmed as this letter went out. Against all of that, crude gave back a piece of Wednesday's surge. A widening war that takes oil down is the most interesting thing on the tape, and the paid section walks through what it says about which risk the market is actually pricing.

The other story ran through Tokyo. The yen had its most violent session in years on Thursday, a move that currency desks attribute to Japan's finance ministry buying its own currency at record scale. The ministry will not say. The Bank of Japan then held its policy rate and trimmed its own inflation forecast. Underneath both stories, the dollar index lost a round number it had held all month.

The AI margin scare, meanwhile, met the largest cloud franchise and lost. Amazon raised its spending plans while its cloud profitability expanded, the opposite of what Wednesday's worry predicted, and equities recovered most of the midweek slide. One honest caveat: every Friday number here is a morning reading, and today's settlements land after this letter goes out.

For paying subscribers below: the full regime dashboard, data, and mapped sources. The settlement pair behind the crude divergence and the demand line it left intact; the intervention arithmetic and every Tokyo marker after the Bank of Japan's decision; what moved inside the fed funds board after the dollar lost its handle; and Amazon's margin numbers with the one-time gains separated out.