#market

AT&T and TMO are also up. Look at the history of these telecom stocks. They go up when the other equities go down due to market risks increasing (wars, rising oil, etc.). Grandma clutches her pearls tighter and moves her money to utilities. She'll move it out of telecom when she thinks the risk is less, and VZ will then continue it's slide.

Demand destruction coming in 3, 2, 1 ... Who is going to buy an overpriced Apple or Samsung mobile phone now?

Stock at $168 and change,

https://www.reuters.com/business/qualcomm-tells-customers-double-digit-price-increases-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-07-24/

Did you know Arista is half the market cap of Cisco and only has 5100 employees compared to 86,000 employees at Cisco?

Did you see stock post earnings? Where is this going?

IBM management to duck and hide after market close

To stay at Teradata is to do a disservice to yourself. You cannot change what poor leadership is doing to the company. No amount of sweat, blood, and tears will save you. We tell ourselves to hang on a little longer, that if we can just make it through this round of layoff, that if we can be the hardest worker on the team, our manager will see they can't afford to lose me.

Sorry. This is what denial looks like. And when they cut you (it is coming), you will kick yourself for staying. You will regret not having your resume updated and circulating the market already. You'll regret all the nights, weekends, holidays, and family events, you gave up for this company. For nothing. Certainly not for money, recognition, a raise, or a bonus. Take it from someone who knows. I live with regrets. But you've been warned. Do better - for yourself. Best wishes.

Communications giant Verizon $VZ reports its Q2 earnings next week – July 24 – with Wall Street analysts becoming increasingly worried about the impact of competition from Elon Musk’s newly listed SpaceX $SPCX.

VZ’s share price is up 10.4% in the year-to-date, helped by its cost-cutting program to boost efficiencies and M&A such as its $20 billion purchase of fiber-optic internet provider Frontier Communications.

Wall Street expects Verizon to report earnings per share of $1.28 in Q2, up from the $1.22 it reported in the same period last year. Revenues are tipped to come in at $35.23 billion, up from $34.44 billion last time.

What Do Analysts Say?

Scotiabank Four-star TipRanks-rated analyst Maher Yaghi recently lowered his price target to $51.50 from $54.50 but kept an Outperform rating on the stock. It came as part of a report into the telecommunication services sector. Yaghi said he was adjusting some multiples on these stocks down to “investor trepidation to increased satellite competition”. However, he said he continues to favor Verizon in the sector.

The competition is likely to refer to the continued expansion of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite services. Its growth is set to be rocket-fueled by the recent IPO of parent company SpaceX $SPCX.

Indeed, Bernstein analyst Laurent Yoon gave a similar reasoning after lowering his price target on VZ to $44 from $49, keeping a Market Perform rating on the shares.

“While SpaceX’s Starlink is unlikely to have a substantial near-term impact for telecom companies, it represents another competitor in an already mature and highly penetrated broadband market,” he said. Yoon believes the presence of Starlink implies subscriber gains for one provider will increasingly come at the expense of another, making market share shifts more consequential. “Uncertainty surrounding Starlink is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon,” he said.

There has been much industry commentary about whether Starlink would be forming an MVNO – Mobile Virtual Network Operator – partnership with a major telecoms company or operate as an independent mobile carrier. Indeed, SpaceX is reportedly now considering launching a Starlink retail product and could build its own terrestrial U.S. mobile network.

Five-star TipRanks-rated Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall believes Verizon has “the most to lose and the most to gain from an MVNO with Starlink,” applying a 40% probability to such a deal. He noted that a VZ-Starlink Mobile MVNO “would be mid-to-high single digit percentage accretive to EBITDA/EPS by 2032.”

He recently initiated Verizon at Equal Weight with a $43 price target and named it Wells Fargo’s most preferred telco.

I hate this job and this company. I'd leave if I could, but the market is awful. The only silver lining is that layoffs happen all the time, so I might get out with severance eventually.

The market is terrible right now. Companies are lowballing skilled workers because they know people are desperate. I hate this place, but at least I have a job.

June 30th was the drop dead day to file the IPO. They've been shopping the IPO for 6 months and the market said "no thanks". Anemic growth (circa 1%), one time ebita bump from massive cost cuts and the McGraw IPO flop has put a nail in this coffin. I predict Apollo will look to carve up the peices and get their money back .KKR is probably pushing for the same thing. MH? he will be gone and I bet the process has already started. NK and the rest of the pretenders? Well they will jockey for position but Apollo will bring in an outsider to carve up the corpse. All the folks who jumped on this bandwagon are, I'm sure, not as upbeat as 3 weeks ago. They jumped on a sinking ship, threw the crew overboard and now their hubris will fade away rather quickly as they look to the exits

Be ready if you are on a discipline or floating on performance tomorrow. 10% cuts are expected. Just when you thought them removing the 50% per month written warning was a favor for you. Syke, it’s just easier to blindside you with a layoff; cheaper too.

After the $130 all-time high, it has continued to fall and now is down for the past 1 month. How long will it stay above $100 until the street realizes Cisco is just rebranding the usual Switching orders as AI Infra? There’s no meaningful improvement in other BUs like Wireless or SBG - more than the traditional single digit growth.

Given what's happened to spcx, smh, igv, smci, are we seeing the peeling off of the AI trade that now appears to have claimed ibm?

Company’s market share will be cut in half fast

Front page of the online version of the WSJ at time of article publication and still there as this is being posted -- 06:01 UTC, Wed., 15 July 2026.
There is no way in he|| that AK can remain as CEO after presiding over this absolutely catastrophic devastation. No CEO can (or should) survive presiding over losing 25% of the company's value in one day.
Perhaps this will spur another company to finally make and offer to buy it.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ibm-stock-profit-warning-earnings-software-8652c06e

Shares of the corporate stalwart plunged 25% as AI purchases crowd out traditional tech spending in many companies’ budgets

By: Robbie Whelan and Heather Gillers |
July 14, 2026 5:18 pm ET

The SaaS-pocalypse has come for IBM [IBM -25.21%]. Shares fell more than 25% Tuesday, the largest one-day drop on record after the company issued a rare profit warning, citing a shift in customer spending from software to artificial-intelligence hardware and memory chips. IBM is scheduled to release its official second-quarter figures next week and could offer a preview of the toll corporate America’s AI bills might take on software spending.

The selloff in software stocks like Adobe and Salesforce earlier this year was triggered by fears that AI companies like Anthropic would enable people to easily make cheaper copies of the software-as-a-service products sold by traditional firms. However, the selloff in IBM’s shares, which wiped out $69 billion in market capitalization, is being driven by a different phenomenon: worries that new AI purchases will crowd out more traditional tech spending in company budgets.

The rapid rise of AI has made chips more expensive, which in turn has driven up prices for everything from laptops and gaming consoles to AI data-center servers. That run-up in costs has squeezed tech budgets at big institutions including banks—a core customer base for IBM—that buy an enormous amount of computing power from cloud companies to run in-house AI tools.

IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said that in June, clients shifted their quarterly capital expenditures toward servers, storage and memory to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of anticipated price increases.

“These conditions require our teams to execute perfectly, and this quarter we faltered,” Krishna said. “While we anticipated some supply chain-related impact in our expectations, we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization.”

Firms like OpenAI and Anthropic are projecting massive upticks in revenues as more companies test cutting-edge tools for a range of tasks like coding, marketing and data analysis. To pay growing computing bills to those and other AI giants, companies are likely to shave down non-AI software and hardware spending sold by traditional firms, said Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson.

“This earnings season is going to be strewn with companies that fall in that category,” Luria said. “They are hearing from their customers, ‘We need to make room in our budget for AI.’ ”

IBM’s challenges aren’t limited to software. Sales of the z17, the company’s flagship enterprise mainframe designed for the AI age, fell short of its expectations. IBM said it expects infrastructure revenue to fall 7%, after previously anticipating a low-single-digit decline.

Unlike other major AI infrastructure providers and large cloud companies like Nvidia, Google and Oracle, which sell chips and networking hardware and rent computing capacity from their own data centers, IBM focuses on selling hardware and software systems that corporate customers install at their own sites. The company’s customer base is heavily concentrated in financial-services firms.

IBM’s mainframe computing and consulting businesses compete directly with AI models like Claude Code, and its infrastructure business faces threats from the rising deployment of massive AI data-center clusters, which offer enterprise clients access to the computing resources they need, often at more competitive prices.

In late May, IBM announced a $5 billion cybersecurity effort with subsidiary software firm Red Hat, known as Project Lightwell, under which the two companies will deploy tens of thousands of engineers and sophisticated AI tools to help secure software supply chains for enterprise customers including Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Visa and Morgan Stanley.

Chris Versace, chief investment officer at Tematica Research, said that IBM’s comments, paired with recent statements made by some of its major customers, including J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, represented “confirmation that AI adoption and usage are rising and companies are prioritizing it to drive efficiencies and productivity.”

IBM has also invested heavily in infrastructure for quantum computing, widely regarded as the next phase of advanced processing. In June, the company announced it was launching a unit called Anderon, seeded by $1 billion from the Trump administration, which will manufacture silicon wafers for quantum-computing chips, and that it will spend $9 billion more over the next five years to develop quantum supercomputers.

The race is on to secure memory and storage chips, especially those known as DRAM and NAND flash memory, that transfer data and store information on devices. AI companies use those chips to help train and run large language models, coding agents and other tools.

The industry that makes those chips, meanwhile, which includes South Korea’s SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung Electronics, is contending with a memory crunch. The problem has already started to drive up the cost of consumer electronics, from Macs and iPads to Xboxes.

Declines for software companies like Workday, Adobe and ServiceNow were less pronounced Tuesday than IBM’s selloff, but the idea that AI spending is crowding out other parts of companies’ tech budgets rattled software stocks.

Salesforce, Workday, Adobe and ServiceNow all fell more than 5% in the first few minutes of trading before rebounding to end the day down 2.1%, 3.5%, 4.3% and 5.8%, respectively. Investor fears about software budget crowdout likely lessened upon a close read of the IBM warning, Luria said, which cited a key driver of the weakness as a shortfall in demand for the z17 mainframe. Most software companies don’t sell mainframe computers.

Cost of HSI is more than the revenue it generates. 3% HSI customers occupies more than 50% of network capacity.
Hence more layoffs to reduce overall costs.
Stock price stays high bcoz the volume is low average daily is less than 1/10th volume of Verizon or AT&T.
Markets are getting tricked but will this continue?

This will be a giant black (or brown in his case. . .) mark on the AK regime. Thankfully, there's no way they can keep AK in-charge for much longer after this historical disaster.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/ibm-shares-sink-18-on-earnings-warning-d115d564

Weakness in infrastructure arm was worse than anticipated, as clients shifted spending to hardware and memory

By: Robbie Whelan and Robb M. Stewart |
Updated July 14, 2026 10:52 am ET

International Business Machines shares sank as much as 25% in morning trading after the company issued a profit warning citing a shift in customer spending from software to AI hardware and memory chips.

IBM said the performance of its software and infrastructure business fell short of expectations in the second quarter, and the company didn’t react quickly enough to changing market conditions. Tuesday’s share decline was the largest intraday percentage decrease for the company on record.

Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said in a letter to investors that the weakness in IBM’s infrastructure arm was worse than anticipated, driven by a shortfall in demand for the z17, the company’s flagship enterprise mainframe designed for the artificial intelligence age. The company expects infrastructure revenue to fall 7%, after previously anticipating a low-single-digit decline.

The rapid rise of AI caught makers of memory chips, especially the building blocks of high-bandwidth memory known as DRAM and the short-term flash memory known as NAND, off guard. That led to a capacity crunch that has pushed up prices on a wide variety of products—from laptops and gaming consoles to AI data-center servers—as much as 20% to 40% over a short period of time.

Big enterprise customers like banks—a core customer base for IBM—are particularly susceptible to fluctuations in chip prices because they buy an enormous amount of computing power from cloud companies to run in-house tools.

Consumer-facing companies are also feeling the crunch. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said price increases for its devices, including the iPhone, were unavoidable. “There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook told The Wall Street Journal in an exclusive interview.

IBM said it plans to report revenue of $17.2 billion and adjusted earnings of $2.93 a share for the June quarter. Both figures are short of analysts’ expectations of $17.9 billion and $3.01 a share.

Its pretax income margin is expected to have contracted 90 basis points, to 14.4%.

IBM is scheduled to release its official second-quarter figures next week.

Krishna said that in the past few weeks of June, clients shifted their quarterly capital expenditures toward servers, storage and memory to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of anticipated price increases.

“While we anticipated some supply chain-related impact in our expectations, we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization,” Krishna said.

“These conditions require our teams to execute perfectly, and this quarter we faltered,” Krishna said. He explained that IBM didn’t adapt and move quickly enough, and a number of large deals failed to close on the timelines expected.

“IBM got hit with a triple whammy,” Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne said in a note to clients Tuesday. “The AI buildout is concentrating capex in hardware like memory chips and diverting spend from software and services. Markets are going to punish legacy players showing signs of losing ground in the AI race.”

Bourne predicted that as more customers shift away from software as a service to more enterprise AI, investors could see more quarters like this one: “But I think it’s a disruption story, not necessarily an extinction one for legacy software companies. Spending patterns will shift from the present focus, and the vendors that adapt their products to the changing market will stay competitive.”

Nordic Veneer has ceased operations at its Roseburg facility after 72 years in business. The company's final production day was July 2nd, leading to the layoff of most of its approximately 55 employees. Plant Manager Bayley Adams cited intense international competition and rising wood supply costs as significant challenges. A major blow came in April when a primary buyer, Roseburg Forest Products, stopped purchasing their veneer. The company is now considering selling the facility or waiting for a more favorable market.

Roseburg, Oregon

https://www.opb.org/article/2026/07/08/nordic-veneer-closes-mill-in-roseburg-after-more-than-72-years/

I know, share price means nothing.

To carry out put options well into 2027 and watch dells market cap collopase. Hardware is dead

This isn’t investment advice. Just sharing something I read because there was a lot of hype around the SpaceX IPO on this very forum.

https://x.com/gnoble79/status/2076080526042038465

The largest IPO in history is also shaping up to be the largest exit liquidity operation in history

SpaceX went public at more than 90x revenue, and the insiders who bought in at a fraction of today's price are about to start selling their shares to you.

Let me walk you through why this IPO is built to separate retail investors from their money:

SpaceX has NEVER turned a profit and lost close to $5 billion last year.

At the offering you were paying more than 90x revenue and at the peak the market briefly valued it near 140x.

30 years ago the head of Sun Microsystems explained in detail why paying even 10x revenue almost always ends in tears, and he was right.

But listen closely, because the valuation is not even the real story.

The scarcity is what CREATED this valuation in the first place, and the calendar that ki-ls the scarcity is what ki-ls the price.

Less than 5% of SpaceX shares were actually available to trade at the IPO. Then the index committees REWROTE their own rules to fast track the stock into the Nasdaq 100 just 15 trading days after listing, which forced every passive fund and index ETF in the country to buy at the exact moment the float was at its tightest. The Nasdaq inclusion alone forced an estimated $4.3 billion of buying, and the Russell reweighting added roughly $3 billion more.

The supply was minuscule and the buying was mandatory. That's a manufactured squeeze, and it is why the stock went above $225 in its first week.

Now watch what happens next, because this is the part they ain't explaining to you:

The lockup was staggered on purpose, and the entire schedule is sitting in the prospectus for anyone who bothers to read it.

In early August, right after Q2 earnings, 20% of the locked shares come free. Another 10% unlocks early if the stock trades 30% above the $135 IPO price going into the report.

Then tranches of 7% hit the market at 70, 90, 105, 120 and 135 days after the IPO, which means fresh insider supply lands roughly every 2 to 3 weeks from late August through late October.

Q3 earnings triggers the single biggest release of all, another 28%, roughly 1.3 billion shares. On December 8 the 180 day lockup expires entirely. And on June 12, 2027 comes the final wave, when Musk's own 6.4 billion shares, 42% of the whole company, become sellable for the first time.

Add it all up and insiders could be free to sell as much as 44% of the company by early September, which would balloon the tradable float by roughly 900%.

All of that supply lands on a stock the company deliberately packed with retail, because SpaceX reserved close to 30% of the offering for individual investors vs the usual 10%.

This deal created over 4,400 paper millionaires inside the company. You think none of them are looking to cash out?

Early holders are already loading up on puts to lock in what they have.

First they keep the float tiny. Then they let the index rules force the world to buy at the top. Then they release a flood of insider stock into a crowd of retail buyers who were handed the shares up high.

When the price finally breaks the offering level, the people who got in years ago at pennies on today's dollar will hit the bid, and the exit liquidity is your retirement account.

And what are you actually left holding? Strip away the science fiction and the only business inside SpaceX that reliably earns money is Starlink, which produced $1.2 billion of operating income last quarter. A wonderful business worth hundreds of billions on its best day. NOT $2 trillion.

Serious fair value work lands around $30 a share.

Nobody has been a bigger bear on this deal than me. I called it out the moment it started trading, and it is already playing out on schedule as the shares have given back the entire squeeze and slipped below their opening print.

I was Peter Lynch's auto analyst back in 1981 and I have watched every disaster since, and I am telling you this is one of the great wealth transfers of my lifetime packed into a fancy narrative.

Tesla was the biggest misallocation of capital in the history of stock markets. SpaceX may have just surpassed it.

SPCX goes straight onto my short list, and the beauty of this setup is that the catalyst is not a guess or something, it is literally a PUBLISHED CALENDAR.

This is the most grossly overpriced stock at scale that I have ever seen.

I asked AI for a friend about Possible acquisition of Teradata.

“ Teradata is widely considered a notable and highly viable takeover target for private equity (PE) firms and larger tech conglomerates. Multiple financial institutions and market dynamics point to Teradata being a prime candidate for a strategic acquisition“

Just sayin…. If the pattern fits…. Wear it.

Dell kickin a-s with a third of the market, 40% y/y growth
Powerstore
PowerMax
PowerVault
PowerScale
What's there not to love?

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/08/att-could-sink-as-starlink-use-soars-wells-fargo-says.html

Wells Fargo initiated coverage of AT&T with an underweight rating and set an $18 price target, implying nearly 15% downside from Tuesday's close.
In a note to clients, analyst Steven Cahall says Starlink is a near-term gainer in broadband relative to fixed wireless access and a longer-term disruptor to wireless. He says competition is likely to be fierce outside AT&T's fiber footprint, while the company's weaker market share footholds outside wireline areas leave its wireless net additions most at risk.

Cahall also says AT&T is less likely than rivals to strike a mobile virtual network operator partnership with Starlink. That leaves the company needing stronger execution in fiber and convergence to create upside for the stock, in his view.

I’m younger. I don’t have a pension. I’m here because the job makes financial sense for my role. Call that “market-based” if you want. But if a better opportunity comes along, I’m gone.

Most of the employees around me everyday are much closer to retirement than I am. Some are already beyond the Rule of 75. If a voluntary package comes along, they’ll likely take it. If not, they can afford to wait it out.

The irony is that the current strategy is pushing out the very people the company should be trying hardest to keep.

As the job market improves, us younger employees with transferable skills will have more options. Five-day RTO, presence reports, and constant uncertainty make it easier to say yes to those opportunities.

Replacing us won’t be cheap, and it won’t be quick. Hiring costs are higher, onboarding takes time, and it can take years before a new employee reaches full productivity. Then, if the culture hasn’t changed, they’ll leave too.

The solutions is straightforward - - Offer a voluntary separation package to employees who are already considering retirement instead of waiting for attrition.

Return to a 2–3 day hybrid schedule to improve recruiting and retention. If leadership insists on five-day RTO, then compensation will have to become much more competitive.

Hold individuals accountable for performance. If someone isn’t doing the job, manage that directly. Don’t build policies around the assumption that everyone needs to be treated the same because a few people aren’t performing.

The company talks a lot about being “market-based”… The labor market is about to remind them what that actually means.

Looks like Hudson was saved for now. Maybe they can't find a buyer yet. Mt Top has been sold.

PepsiCo loses major corporate customer. Fiat Costco. Now Global Marriott.

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/marriott-coca-cola-announce-global-135547786.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAACOxJwc5TBLn8TFc1UGltv_KeyahbBEI_jn1cjXczjWyrIQAsjU0Xa1_ZF2XLYz4eC6Gxz9F-O0bsdyIc-UT0EOxPjtJl4Dlj_o1Cqsgro_NBgCIs3fbS-5oryhHfu_CH3AuMbMS9eCzmtc9AXCuhl0gHMBAMz5V4G5ZBXpmF7_O

Why do we keep seeing these bull headlines for Nike with nothing to back it up to show that they can do it. This says Nike could have a 40+ % swing my July of Nike year. What are you thoughts?

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/prediction-nike-stock-set-25-141550863.html

Shell can’t drill it’s self to prosperity so it’s levers are buy Shell stock, offload marginal production, and try to buy a company with existing production. Shell needs a big move within the next 6 months.

How’s a Woodside and Shell marriage? Certainly satisfy the Asia market while reduced investment in the ME.

How’s Kosmos? Cheap and get instant gas to Europe

Dells market cap will be cut in half in the coming weeks. Nobody needs Dell anymore, take your energy polluting products to Mars

the market knows we are swirling the drain.
It knows NOT to reward us because we are not doing anything that should be rewarded.

Nike Inc
NYSE: NKE
42.38 USD -117.37 (-73.47%) past 5 years
Jul 1, 1:11 PM EST

The USD in real terms is 24.3% less valuable in that same 5 year period, which means NKE market cap has collapsed to less than 1/5 its value 5 years ago.

"Believe in Something, Even if it Means Sacrificing Errr-Thang!"

We are hiring and have returned to growth

Hundreds of open positions with a clear hiring and go to market strategy

The markets love us and are rewarding us with a solid stock price

https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jones/202606306878/att-down-nearly-5-on-track-for-lowest-close-since-september-2024-data-talk

Or everyone is leaving voluntarily in the worst job market ever.

Which one could it be

Rex Tillerson recently visited LT with a very pessimistic outlook of market and economic prospects. He highlighted that factors leading to a black swan are highly probable. As we all know this will be a perfect opportunity for XOM to grow inorganically and further cement its position as a market leader.
What type of event do you predict?
Last time we were given the COVID crisis this time maybe consequential…nonsense or fortuitous?

Over the past six months, China has launched 622 new car models. That is not innovation. That is an industry on life support.

Picture a car factory running at half capacity. Assembly lines built for thousands of vehicles a day are operating at less than 50%. The machines are paid for either way. Sitting idle costs more than building something.

That is the real reason behind the flood of new models. Lithium carbonate, the key battery material, crashed from nearly 600,000 RMB per ton to just 80,000. Launching a new car became dramatically cheaper. So factories that cannot sell enough of what they already make simply make something new instead.

But here is the real twist. It is not only about factories. Public car companies face their own pressure. Go six months without launching a new model, and rating agencies may downgrade the stock. So some of these new cars are not built for drivers at all. They are built to keep a stock price alive.

Faster R&D has made this even easier. Skateboard chassis platforms, combined with AI-assisted design, have cut development time from 63 months down to just 12 to 15 months. China did not just make cars cheaper to build. It made it cheap to keep building cars nobody asked for.

So here is the result. Roughly 80% of these 622 models are statistically doomed to disappear. So if you are buying, check who makes the core components, check the brand’s survival odds, and give yourself a three-month cooling-off period before you commit.

In this market, the newest electric car on the lot might be the first one to vanish.

I’m Ling, a tech analyst from China.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNRwjAkjy/

The global economy now uses roughly half as much energy per dollar of output as it did in 1980, helping cushion oil shocks.

Read more in F&D magazine.

https://www.imf.org/.../2026/06/picture-this-shock-absorbers

Oil prices have risen sharply with the latest war in the Middle East, reviving memories of the 1970s. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a route for about a quarter of seaborne oil trade, represents a major global supply shock. The damage will depend largely on how long the disruption lasts. Oil markets were well supplied heading into the disruption, strategic stock releases added barrels, and buoyant financial markets helped limit broader tightening in financial conditions.

Beyond these immediate buffers, two structural factors have also cushioned the blow. First, the world economy is far more energy efficient than it was 50 years ago. Each dollar of output now requires roughly half as much energy as it did in 1980.

Second, the energy system is more diversified. Oil’s share of the mix has fallen from about half in 1973 to less than a third today. Oil remains the world’s leading fuel, but it no longer dominates.

Even so, these cushions do not protect countries from pain evenly. Ultimately, the severity of the shock at the country level depends on two things: how much oil an economy imports and how much policy space its government has to respond. More than 80 percent of countries are net oil importers, and the most vulnerable entered this episode with limited room in public budgets to shield households and businesses. That is why the same global shock can become a much harsher national one where import dependence is high and policy space is thin.