As Trump rages against his allies, Republicans are asking what the plan is to end the chaos in Iran

Joe Kent, the director of the White House’s National Counterterrorism Center, resigned, drawing attention to the Trump Administration’s strategy for winning, ending, or exiting the war with Iran.

Kent said he resigned because the U.S. should have never been involved in the first place and that Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, according to Fortune’s Catherina Gioino.

Fortune

Republicans are becoming more openly dissenting in public about the war.

The article notes that the U.S. and Israel have two different aims: the U.S. is focused on destroying Iran’s military capabilities, while Israel hunts down top-level Tehran regime members.

The result is chaos, described as producing butterfly effects across the world, including potential disruptions to Taiwan’s chip production due to Middle East energy disruptions and helium.

The U.A.E. reportedly wants Iran neutralized for good.

De Deutsche Bank’s George Saravelos cautions that these dynamics could spill over into the semiconductor supply chain and the broader credit cycle.

Shipping groups have invoked a 19th-century law that allows them to dump cargo at the nearest convenient port, with containers destined for the Middle East diverted to India or the U.A.E.

Until Iran’s layered capabilities—mines, fast attack craft, submarines and drones—are neutralized, the Strait of Hormuz won’t reopen anytime soon; Trump has lashed out that NATO declined to send minesweepers, and four of the Navy’s anti-mining ships are heading to Philadelphia for decommissioning, while another four are in Japan.

Powell is expected to hold the line against oil-driven inflation on Fed day, with UBS’s Paul Donovan noting the Fed is universally expected to leave policy unchanged while markets weigh oil prices and the war.

Oil was at $102 this morning and moderating downward after Iraq made a deal to export oil through Turkey, avoiding the Strait of Hormuz.

Fortune

U.S. retail gasoline prices sit about a dollar above 2026 lows, having risen every day for four weeks.

The optimism continued in Asia and Europe: South Korea’s KOSPI was up 5%, Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 2.87%, Stoxx Europe 600 up 0.57%, and the U.K.’s FTSE 100 up 0.33% midmorning.

If oil stays above $100 per barrel for a full year, the tax benefits for Americans in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act ($800 per person) will be fully wiped out due to inflation, according to Wells Fargo’s estimates.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company is considering paying engineers in tokens—the currency of AI—to amplify their output.

He could totally imagine in the future every single engineer in our company will need an annual token budget; they’re going to make a few 100,000 a year as their base pay, and I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of it as tokens so that they could be amplified 10 times.

Capgemini Chief Strategy Officer Fernando Alvarez says AI isn’t destroying consultants; clients still want domain expertise, governance, cybersecurity, and the ability to interact with legacy systems.

Mark Zuckerberg is poised to finish what Jack Dorsey started: a cascade of AI-related layoffs across the tech sector.

A gaming CEO asked ChatGPT how to avoid paying a 250 million bonus; it didn’t work.

Benchmark’s Bill Gurley says the AI bubble is about to burst—and a reset is coming.

Prediction markets see the war getting longer.

The Wells Fargo team led by Ohsung Kwon says the longer the war goes with Iran, the worse it gets for risk assets.

Fortune

They don’t expect a ceasefire until early June, just before the World Cup starts.

The article also notes $18 billion of outflows from exchange-traded funds covering the S&P 500, as a percentage of market cap—the largest such outflow since March 2023, per Wells Fargo.