April 13, 2026
The U.S./Iran peace talks broke down after the first day.
The president has announced that the U.S. will blockade Iran’s ports.
Hungary’s 16-year authoritarian ruler Viktor Orban was decisively defeated in his reelection bid. Last year, Hungary fell to the poorest of the EU’s 27 member states.
The Artemis II astronauts returned to earth safely. Yay, science!
Stock markets benefitted from the Iranian war cease-fire last Wednesday, and the subsequently planned peace talks. Now that direct talks have ended, stocks are slipping and the price of oil is rising. Intermediaries from Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey are still trying to make progress toward peace.
As expected, inflation is increasing, led by oil prices and everything they affect: food costs, automobile costs, and the cost of almost everything else that is trucked around the country. (And if you don’t know how much of the stuff we buy is trucked in, drive around the back of a Walmart sometime to see the empty semis.)
February’s personal-consumption-expenditures price index was released last week and showed that prices rose 0.4% in February, while the year-over year number stayed at 2.8%. Then we got the consumer-price index (CPI), which rose 0.9% in March alone, and 3.3% for the trailing twelve months. You’ll of course remember that the Federal Reserve has an inflation target of 2%. According to Axios, consumer prices have risen a cumulative total of 26% since January of 2021.
The University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey preliminary reading for April fell 11% to 47.6. If the final reading confirms this number, it would be the lowest reading on record. The previous low of 50 came at the height of the Biden-era inflation. (Inflation hit 9.1% in the month of June 2022.)
Initial unemployment claims rose to 219,000 in the week ending on April 4th. The March job numbers, as reported on April 5th, showed employment rose by 178,000. Together, the data show a relatively stable employment situation. We must remain aware, however, that our pool of workers is stagnant, what with immigration crackdowns and Boomer retirements. So far artificial intelligence (AI) is creating jobs, not killing them, but we don’t know for how long this will continue. Currently 61.9% of the working-age population is working or looking for work, which is the lowest level since 1977, except for the pandemic. In order to grow our gross domestic product (GDP) we must add workers or make current workers more productive.
The most prevalent form of fraud that Americans face is now cyber investment scams. According to the FBI, in 2025 more than one million people complained of these scams to the authorities, and the total amount that was stolen by scammers exceeded $20 billion.
For the week ending on April 10th, the Standard & Poor’s 500 finished at 6,816, the Nasdaq Composite at 22,902, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 47,916. The yield on the ten-year Treasury Note closed at 4.317%. WTI (U.S.) crude oil cost 103.66 per barrel, while Brent crude (international) cost $101.95. These prices are changing all the time. New York gold was bid at $4,747.20 per ounce, and one Euro was worth $1.17.
Elizabeth E. Cook
Partner, Diastole Wealth Management
News and information presented here was gathered from sources believed, but not guaranteed, to be reliable, including (but not limited to) Yahoo Finance, Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, Axios, CNBC, Business Insider, Bloomberg and Bloomberg Business Week, The Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Guardian, CNN, Fortune, The Hustle, Gizmodo, Reuters, The New York Times, and The AP. If you have questions, please call Diastole at 203.458.5220, or email me, Liz Cook, at ecook@dwinvest.com. Thank you for reading!
Rolls Royce has announced a new EV, the Black Badge Spectre. It is sleek and gorgeous and costs half-a-million dollars. In a related story, it cost more than $100 to fill my gas tank last week. Darn it, I should have bought the Rolls!