Today is the halfway point of the 60-day Iran deal. The first half looked nothing like a peace process.

Thirty days ago the US and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding giving themselves 60 days to negotiate Iran's nuclear program, missile capabilities, and freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. Today is day 30. The halfway point. Here is what the first half actually looked like.

Thirty days in. The MOU is not working and the US just sent refueling planes to Israel.

The June 17 memorandum of understanding called for negotiations over Iran's nuclear and missile programs, sanctions, and freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. The first half of that period has been marked by repeated Iranian attacks on commercial vessels, hundreds of US strikes on Iranian military targets, retaliatory missile and drone attacks across the region, and President Trump declaring the ceasefire over.

The US is sending dozens of refueling planes to Israel ahead of a potential expansion of scope in the Iran war, according to Axios, citing Israeli and US sources. Options might include striking Iranian power plants, targeted strikes on nuclear facilities, or hitting an underground site suspected to be a nuclear facility. An Iranian strike damaged a Kuwait desalination plant today, exposing water vulnerability across the dry Middle East.

The International Energy Agency warned today of severe global energy security risks if the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked in the coming weeks, the clearest institutional alarm yet from an energy watchdog about what the second half of this 60-day window could cost.

The read underneath all of that is the one worth sitting with on a Friday afternoon. The MOU was designed as a 60-day off-ramp. Day 30 finds the US expanding its military posture rather than contracting it, Iran hitting civilian water infrastructure rather than pulling back, and refueling planes moving toward Israel, which is the kind of logistical signal that precedes a larger operation, not a diplomatic breakthrough. The second half of the 60-day window opens this weekend with no negotiating track visibly active and an escalation ladder that has added rungs every week since the deal was signed.

Netflix missed. Read it as a consumer story not a streaming story.

Netflix plunged on weak guidance today as chip stocks led a global sell-off.

We flagged Thursday that Netflix was the week's cleanest read on whether the upper-income consumer who kept flying Delta and paying elevated fares was still spending at the top. The miss on guidance answers that question with more nuance than a simple yes or no. Netflix is not losing subscribers. It is guiding conservatively on revenue growth, which means the advertising tier uptake and live content monetization are not converting at the rate the market priced in. That is not a crisis. It is a ceiling on discretionary premium spending that is lower than expected, from the exact consumer cohort that has been holding the economy's consumer narrative together all quarter. PepsiCo missed by a penny on the low end. Netflix missed on guidance at the high end. The consumer picture is more compressed from both directions than either data point alone suggests.

The IMF said global disinflation has stalled. That is not a prediction. It is a diagnosis.

The IMF's July 2026 World Economic Outlook projects global growth at 3.0% for 2026, but notes that global disinflation has stalled and that the war shock is weighing on energy importers and vulnerable economies, while AI-driven demand is lifting countries integrated into the global technology value chain.

The distinction between a stalled disinflation and a resurgence of inflation matters more than it sounds. Stalled means the progress made in 2024 and early 2025 has stopped but not reversed. It means central banks that were planning to cut rates this year are now frozen, unable to cut because inflation is not falling fast enough, and unable to hike aggressively because growth is already soft. The ECB held rates at elevated levels after its June hike, noting that Middle East tensions are generating price pressures across the euro area, while in the US, falling jobless claims make a cut before September look increasingly unlikely. The result is a global interest rate floor that is higher and stickier than markets priced at the start of the year, and that floor is not coming down while refueling planes are moving toward Israel.

Consumer sentiment jumped 10%. The market did not know what to do with that.

The University of Michigan's preliminary reading of consumer sentiment for July showed the overall index climbed 10% for the second consecutive month.

Two consecutive months of 10% gains in consumer sentiment during an active war in the Gulf, a global tech sell-off, and a stalled disinflation environment is the kind of data point that makes analysts pause. The most likely explanation is that lower gasoline prices in June created a real, tangible improvement in how households feel about their finances, regardless of what is happening in bond markets or geopolitics. The risk is that this sentiment reading, like the CPI and PPI prints earlier this week, is capturing June rather than July. Gasoline prices are rising again. The refueling planes heading toward Israel are not a sentiment-positive development. August's consumer sentiment reading will be the one that tells you whether this week's number was a trend or a lag.

The thread underneath Friday and the week

Today is day 30 of a 60-day deal that has not produced a single negotiating session. Netflix guided conservatively at the same moment PepsiCo missed by a penny, compressing the consumer picture from both ends simultaneously. The IMF diagnosed a stalled disinflation that central banks on two continents are now frozen inside. And consumer sentiment jumped 10% for the second straight month in data that is almost certainly capturing a world that existed in June.

The week that started with the most data-dense morning of 2026 ends with more open questions than it resolved. Everything this week was prologue.

What to watch next week: Monday opens the second half of the 60-day Iran MOU window with no active negotiating track and refueling planes already in position. July 29 is now twelve days away. August 12 is the next CPI print. Three dates, three verdicts on whether the story this week told turns out to be a warning or a preview. Next week is not a data week. It is a reckoning week.

See you Monday...

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