Tuesday, February 24, 2026…4:10 PM ET
[4:00 PM ET closing prices for stocks; 3:50ish for commodities and bonds.]
Stocks rebounded from their AI-related fears of the past week or so, even as Anthropic announced a slew of new tools (plug-ins) that threaten the software industry.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced today that the U.S. is imposing a new tariff from Tuesday of 10% on all goods not covered by exemptions, the rate first announced by President Trump last Friday rather than the 15% he promised a day later.
Reacting to the Supreme Court ruling that threw out tariffs it deemed were illegally justified on grounds of an emergency, Trump had said he’d introduce a new temporary global tariff of 10%, and then Saturday he said he was increasing it to 15%.
Confused? Will he clarify tonight in his State of the Union Address? CBP offered no explanation for why the lower rate had been used. The Financial Times quoted a White House official as saying the increase up to 15% would come later.
Speaking of the State of the Union (SOU), it will begin around 9 p.m. ET, and Trump has promised it would be long. Last year’s address to Congress set a record as the longest joint session speech, running nearly 1 hour and 40 minutes.
The president has said he has a lot to discuss and many of us are wondering if he’ll finally tell the American people what he expects from his massive military buildup in the Middle East, targeting Iran.
Joint Chief Chairman Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, according to multiple reports, has said a war against Iran could be a prolonged and damaging conflict with numerous U.S. casualties.
But Trump posted on Truth Social late yesterday that the reports are “incorrect.”
“General Caine, like all of us, would like not to see War but, if a decision is made on going against Iran at a Military level, it is his opinion that it will be something easily won.”
This is exactly the kind of talk that Gen. Caine would not want to see.
The Pentagon has already sent nearly half of its deployable U.S. air power to the region. “Think air power on the order of the 1991 and 2003 Iraq war,” Robert Pape of the University of Chicago said Saturday. “Never has the U.S. deployed this much force against a potential enemy and not launched strikes.”
Finally, today represents four years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Feb. 24, 2022.
With peace negotiations stalled, Russia has sought to portray its victory in Ukraine as inevitable. But losses among the Kremlin’s troops now number well over one million, and its grinding offensives advance at a few dozen yards a day at best, according to a recent analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Intelligence Studies and the conclusions of several European defense-intelligence departments.
At the same time, long-range strikes by Ukraine, Western sanctions and ship seizures are pushing down prices for Russian oil that are critical for Moscow to sustain its military efforts.
Seth Jones, president of the defense and security department at CSIS, said that is why Vladimir Putin is dangling economic deals in front of Trump – to tempt him to cut off support to Ukraine or try to force Kyiv to hand over territory that his army hasn’t conquered.
“That’s the big breakthrough in a war that his military is unable to win,” Jones said of Putin. “The real hope is that the U.S. will come to their aid.”
Russian military casualties total some 1.2 million, of which as many as 325,000 have been killed, more than double the numbers for Ukraine, according to CSIS. Ukraine’s top military commander. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy, said last week that Russia wasn’t able to replace its battlefield losses in 2025.
But Ukraine, too, is struggling to raise enough manpower.
The UK’s armed-forces minister, Alistair Carns, said Russia had been at war longer than in World War II and lost over 4,000 tanks, 10,000 armed vehicles and had its navy arguably destroyed by a country that never had a navy.
But what will Donald Trump say tonight on the topic?
Dow Jones +370…0.8% [49174]
S&P 500 +52…0.8% [6890]
Nasdaq +236…1.0% [22863]
Oil (WTI) $66.30
Gold $5170
Silver $87.30
Bitcoin $64,496 [4:00 PM ET]
U.S. 2-yr. 3.46%
U.S. 10-yr. 4.04%
Japanese 10-yr. 2.08%
Back Wednesday.
Brian Trumbore
