Wall Street is the biggest winner of the Iran war—and the S&P 500 just turned positive for the year

Markets opened down nearly 1% across the indexes on Monday, but news-aggregating accounts online and on social media picked up a report by New York Post Pentagon reporter Caitlin Doornbos. At 7:46 a.m. Monday, Doornbos had posted on X that Iranian officials were still considering a U.S. proposal to end the war, “centering around uranium enrichment.”

“One thing affecting why Iran couldn’t make a deal while U.S. was in Islamabad … Iranians could not call their final decision-maker back in Tehran due to security risks,” she wrote, citing a “Pakistani analyst.” 

Soon, the headline traveled. Brent crude began dropping steeply, down roughly 4% to about $4.50 a barrel, roundtripping hundreds of millions of dollars notionally across the front-month contract. Doornbos received hundreds of replies to her post, calling her a liar, a market-manipulator and a pawn of the Trump regime.

By 11 a.m., she issued another post—”she had a responsibility to clarify”—that her original post contained no news, at all. She was just reiterating what was known; that discussions were centered on the nuclear deal, which Vice President JD Vance had already said, and that theoretically Iranians could accept.

“This took off unnecessarily,” Doornbos wrote. 

Brent crude began climbing again, hitting $103 briefly before ...