Global investors were holding steady in the face of yet another deadline imposed by President Donald Trump in the U.S. war with Iran, perhaps sensing a pattern of threats and retreats in the monthlong conflict.  

The president has given Iran until 8 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday to reach a cease-fire agreement that is “acceptable to me” and also includes the “free traffic of oil and everything” through the Strait of Hormuz or face severe military consequences. 

Reopening Hormuz, a factor Trump has previously insisted is both unnecessary and important to American interests, adds a new layer of complexity to the ongoing talks, which include multiple parties and dozens of mediators. And it also likely creates the conditions for yet another shifting deadline. 

Global oil markets are still pricing in further disruption, but futures prices for summer and autumn deliveries are easing, and investors see more volatility in near-term demand prices than longer-term supply problems. 

Stocks were cautiously higher to end thin trading Monday and continued the trend early Tuesday, with investors doing their best to exclude Mideast war risks from their calculus while focusing on GDP growth and corporate earnings prospects. 

But, as White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told reporters in Washington Monday: “Only President Trump knows what he will do, and the entire world will find out tomorrow night if bridges and electric plants [in Iran] are annihilated.”

Having the safety of the region, the fate of financial markets, and the attention of the world focused on the decisions of one man—irrespective of which option he chooses—feels like much more of a risk than the decision itself.

And investors have been navigating those particular waters for a very long time.

—Martin Baccardax

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The record label behind Taylor Swift and Drake may be about to shift its listing to New York from Amsterdam. Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management said on Tuesday that it had made an offer for Universal Music Group.

• Pershing Square said in a statement Tuesday that its cash-and-stock offer was worth an estimated 30.40 euros a share, a 78% premium to UMG’s stock price as of Monday’s close. The deal would value the record label at about €55 billion ($64 billion).

• Under the proposal, UMG would merge with the blank-check acquisition vehicle Pershing Square SPARC Holdings to form a company based in Nevada and listed in New York.

• “UMG’s stock price has languished due to a combination of issues that are unrelated to the performance of its music business and importantly, all of them can be addressed with this transaction,” Ackman, who sat on UMG’s board until May 2025, said on Tuesday. UMG didn’t respond to a request for comment from Barron’s.

What’s Next: The offer comes as Pershing Square gears up for its own U.S. listing. Ackman last month filed for a dual initial public offering of his management company and an investment fund on the New York Stock Exchange.

—George Glover

Broadcom has added some certainty to its relationship with Google’s Alphabet, for which it designs AI chips. In a securities filing on Monday it disclosed a new five-year agreement that firms up the relationship with Google through 2031, and ensures that Broadcom’s networking equipment will be deployed in data centers.

• Though it has become a crowded field, in 2015 Google was the first to make its own custom chips for AI: The Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU. It’s now on its seventh generation, called Ironwood. Broadcom has been codesigning the chips since at least 2016.

• The agreement underlines Broadcom’s position as a major AI chip designer behind industry leader Nvidia. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon notes that Broadcom previously forecast AI revenue for fiscal 2027 of $100 billion, a number that is looking light, meaning Broadcom could beat expectations.

• Also included in the announcement was an extension of Google and Broadcom’s 2025 TPU agreement with AI-startup Anthropic, which will dramatically increase Anthropic’s use of TPUs to run its Claude AI model next year. Anthropic will access about 3.5 gigawatts of TPU computing power through Broadcom.

• Broadcom said in the filing that the consumption of such expanded AI computing power capacity by Anthropic is dependent on Anthropic’s continued commercial success. It also said the parties are “in discussions with certain operational and financial partners.”

What’s Next: Anthropic said in its own announcement that demand from Claude customers has accelerated in 2026, and that its run-rate revenue has passed $30 billion—up from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025. More than 1,000 business customers each spend over $1 million annually, double since February.

—Adam Levine and Liz Moyer

The federal government will pay Medicare insurers an average increase of 2.48% in 2027, which means some of the country’s largest health insurance plans will collect $13 billion in additional payments next year. It was enough to send shares of UnitedHealth and Aetna parent CVS Health 9% higher after hours.

• It was a far greater amount than the 0.09% rate increase proposed in January. Since then Wall Street has been watching for any improvement in the final rate notice, but some were still expecting a smaller bump. Shares of fellow insurer Humana jumped 12%.

• TD Cowen’s Ryan Langston expected a rate increase in the range of 1% to 1.5%. It isn’t unusual for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to release a higher final rate than the one initially proposed. The increase could help margins expand next year, Mizuho’s Jared Holz said.

• About 35 million beneficiaries are in Medicare Advantage plans this year, according to the health research group KFF. Enrollment in the privately-run plans has grown to surpass enrollment in traditional Medicare plans operated by the government.

• Insurers and their trade groups had pushed for a higher rate increase, amid bipartisan calls to curb Medicare Advantage spending. The Better Medicare Alliance had argued that the proposed increase, which was practically zero when medical costs are rising 7% to 9% a year, functions as a cut. 

What’s Next: Under the Biden administration, the Medicare agency began to tighten payments tied to coding, also known as risk scores or risk adjustment. Republicans and Democrats have both raised concerns about practices that allow insurers to collect higher payments for beneficiaries with more recorded medical diagnoses.

—Catherine Dunn and Janet H. Cho

Two promising early signs of pending home sales suggest that some home buyers weren’t entirely discouraged by rising mortgage rates. The readings from Zillow Group and Realtor.com offer hope for the spring homebuying season, despite concerns about mortgage rates that are still hovering around 6.5%.

• Zillow said Monday that March pending home sales, a measure of homes under contract but not yet closed, rose 4.6% from the prior year. The bump suggests that March could have been a busier month than widely expected, says Zillow chief economist Mischa Fisher.

• Realtor.com said March pending sales were 3.9% higher than the previous year. (News Corp, which owns Barron’s, also operates Realtor.com through its Move subsidiary.) Another sign of increased interest: Zillow’s daily average page views per listing are 32% higher than last March.

• Mortgage rates fell briefly below 6% earlier this year before the war in Iran put upward pressure on inflation fears and then mortgage rates. The 30-year fixed rates measured by Mortgage News Daily climbed half a percentage point from the end of February through the end of March.

• Fisher attributes buyers’ apparent resilience last month to rates being lower now than they were this time last year. Also, those under contract may have locked in rates closer to February’s lows than March’s highs, and there could be pent-up demand from years of high interest rates.

What’s Next: Economists polled by FactSet expect a seasonally adjusted 1% increase in March from February when the National Association of Realtors reports its measure of contract signings later this month.

—Shaina Mishkin and Janet H. Cho

NASA’s Artemis II mission made history on Monday, when its four astronauts—Americans Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen—traveled farther away from Earth than any humans in history, beating a record set by the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission in 1970.

• “We will continue our journey even further into space before Mother Earth succeeds in pulling us back to everything we hold dear,” said mission commander Wiseman, adding that he hopes the record is not “long-lived.” They traveled 253,000 miles from Earth, versus 248,655 traveled by Apollo 13 astronauts.

• The Artemis’ milestone moment, which was watched over livestream by hundreds of thousands of people on Monday afternoon, is boosting commercial space stocks. British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic jumped 21% on Monday. It is attempting to rebound from some tough times.

• Last week Virgin Galactic announced it would resume commercial suborbital flights late this year. The company is selling 50 tickets for $750,000 a pop, up from a past fee of $600,000, and it expects to raise prices further as additional tickets become available. 

• The space revival is boosting the outlook for space tourism. The 50 new customers who buy those tickets will join 650 existing “astronauts,” as Virgin Galactic calls them, in the company’s backlog. The co