Beirut/Tel Aviv1:39 a.m. March 24
Tehran3:09 a.m. March 24
Iran War Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Send Conflicting Signals on Peace Prospects
President Trump said talks were underway. A top Iranian official denied that, while other Iranians said messages were being traded through intermediaries.
- Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
- Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
- Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
- Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
- Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
- Ariel Schalit/Associated Press
- Kawnat Haju/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
- Reuters
- Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
- Social media, via Agence France-Presse
Conflicting signals from leaders of the United States, Iran and Israel on Monday left a murky picture of whether peace talks were underway, and what prospects there were for ending the war in the Middle East any time soon.
President Trump told reporters that the United States and Iran were engaging in “very strong talks” toward resolving the war that began on Feb. 28, which had produced “many, like 15 points,” of agreement. He said he was postponing until Friday his threat to attack Iranian power plants while talks take place.
The speaker of Iran’s Parliament denied on social media that any such negotiations were underway, accusing Mr. Trump of issuing false statements to calm rattled energy markets. Iranian officials said their country would continue to fight.
But the Iranians and the Americans were exchanging messages through intermediaries about de-escalating the conflict, with the immediate goal of averting attacks on critical energy infrastructure, according to four Iranian officials and an Iranian diplomat. The officials spoke anonymously to discuss sensitive negotiations.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, after speaking with Mr. Trump, did not state whether peace talks were being held, but said that his American counterpart believed it was possible to “leverage” the military achievements to “realize the objectives of the war in an agreement.” Mr. Netanyahu, in a video statement, said Israel would pursue its campaigns against Iran and its ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah.
Whatever the truth about possible negotiations, the war continued to rage on multiple fronts. The U.S. and Israeli militaries said on Monday that they had carried out fresh waves of strikes on Iran, and Israel continued its offensive in Lebanon. Iran claimed attacks on Israel and Persian Gulf countries, though it was not clear if any of them penetrated air defenses.
Mr. Trump said that a son-in-law of his, Jared Kushner, and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, were leading negotiations, and that the United States was communicating with one of Iran’s leaders, without naming the person. He said the U.S. side was demanding an end to Iranian nuclear enrichment and elimination of the country’s uranium stockpiles that could be used to one day make a bomb, terms that Iran had previously rejected.
Three officials said Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, and Mr. Witkoff had spoken on the phone in recent days, but they said those were preliminary discussions on de-escalation and should not be characterized as negotiations.
The war’s global fallout has seen the price of oil and gas rise sharply since late February — a crisis that is now worse than the oil shocks in 1973 and 1979 combined, according to the head of the International Energy Agency.
Mr. Trump’s statement about talks with Iran immediately reduced energy prices somewhat, but it was unclear how long that could last without tangible progress toward ending the war. The president has repeatedly given optimistic assessments that temporarily eased market jitters, only to have prices rise again.
More than 2,000 people have been killed since the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran that ignited the conflict more than three weeks ago, most of them in Iran and Lebanon, where Israel has fought a second front with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
Israeli air defenses: Israel’s military faced scrutiny on Sunday about Iranian missiles that hit Dimona, a city eight miles away from Israel’s main nuclear facility, and the nearby city of Arad on Saturday night. More than 10 people were seriously injured and dozens more hurt in the strikes, renewing concerns that Israel might be holding back on using its most sophisticated air defenses to avoid depleting them.
Attacks in Lebanon: The Israeli military said early Monday that it had hit the Dallafa Bridge in southern Lebanon, the latest in a series of strikes on vital transit routes that Israel said were used by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed armed group. Monday night, the Israeli military said that it was targeting Hezbollah infrastructure in Beirut, the Lebanese capital, where residents reported hearing explosions.
Death tolls: Iran’s U.N. ambassador said that at least 1,348 civilians had been killed in the country since the start of the war — a toll that has not been updated for over a week. On Friday, a Washington-based group, the Human Rights Activists News Agency, reported that at least 1,398 civilians had been killed. More than 1,000 people in Lebanon have been killed, the authorities there said on Thursday. At least 15 people have been killed in Iranian attacks on Israel, officials have said. The American death toll stood at 13 service members.
War planes were flying over Beirut as a series of airstrikes by the Israeli military that began late on Monday night continued into Tuesday morning. At least seven explosions were heard around the Lebanese capital. The Israeli military said earlier it was targeting Hezbollah infrastructure in Beirut.
The Israeli military said that search-and-rescue teams were operating at a scene in northern Israel where there were reports of an impact early Tuesday morning. The statement came after the military said that it had identified missiles launched from Iran. The national emergency rescue service, Magen David Adom, said paramedics were treating a woman who was injured on the way to a shelter but reported no other casualties.
A remote work mandate in Qatar, which was put in place earlier this month amid the war in the Middle East, has been terminated, Qatar’s state news agency reported in the early hours of Tuesday morning in the Middle East. Qataris in the public and private sectors will resume in-person work on Tuesday, it said.
Conflicting signals from leaders of the United States and Iran on Monday about whether negotiations were in progress left prospects for quickly ending the war in the Middle East unclear.
President Trump on Monday postponed a deadline he had given for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz or face attacks on its energy infrastructure, telling reporters that the United States was engaging in “very strong talks” with the country about resolving the war, which began on Feb. 28.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, said on social media that no negotiations had been held with the United States. But the Iranians and the Americans were exchanging messages through intermediaries, according to four Iranian officials and an Iranian diplomat, who spoke anonymously to discuss sensitive negotiations. Several Iranian officials said Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, and Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, had had preliminary phone discussions about de-escalating.
Here’s what else happened on Monday:
Iran: Mr. Trump’s postponement of strikes on Iran’s power plants gave the country a small reprieve as U.S. Central Command said on Monday that it had already conducted more than 9,000 strikes there in the war, including damaging or sinking more than 140 Iranian naval vessels. Iranian state news media and semiofficial outlets portrayed Mr. Trump’s statement about talks as a sign that he was “backing down.”
Lebanon: The Israeli military hit the Dallafa Bridge in southern Lebanon, the latest in a series of strikes on vital transit routes in the area over recent days. The Lebanese Health Ministry said a person had been killed in a strike on an apartment east of Beirut, the capital. The Israeli military said the attack had targeted a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran, which supports Hezbollah in Lebanon. On Monday night, the Israeli military said that it was targeting Hezbollah infrastructure in Beirut, where residents reported hearing explosions.
Persian Gulf: Oman is “working intensively to put in place safe passage arrangements for the Strait of Hormuz,” the country’s foreign minister, Badr al-Busaidi, said before President Trump asserted that peace talks were underway. Oman has frequently mediated between the United States and Iran. “Whatever your view of Iran, this war is not of their making,” he said. “This is already causing widespread economic problems, and I fear they promise to get much worse if the war continues.”
Israel: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Mr. Trump believed it was possible to “leverage” military achievements to “realize the objectives of the war in an agreement,” noting that Israel was continuing to strike in Iran and in Lebanon. The Israeli military said on Monday that its own errant artillery had killed an Israeli avocado farmer a day earlier near the Lebanese border. In a statement, the military apologized to the victim’s family and to the community of Misgav Am, the small farming cooperative where he lived.
Energy: Oil prices fell on Monday after Mr. Trump suggested peace talks with Iran were underway. Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, fell more than 10 percent to settle below $100 for the first time in almost two weeks, though still far above prewar prices. But Fatih Birol, the leader of the International Energy Agency, warned that the energy crisis caused by the conflict would take time to resolve even if the war were to end soon.
Oil prices fell and stock prices rose on Monday, after the president’s disputed assertion of peace talks with Iran served to soothe financial markets, suggesting to investors that the administration was seeking an off-ramp from the current conflict. The S&P 500 rose 1.1 percent, its best day since the war began. Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, fell more than 10 percent to settle below $100 for the first time in almost two weeks, though still far above prewar prices.
The United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon said on Monday that a projectile hit a building in its headquarters in Naqoura in southern Lebanon, but did not say how much damage was done. “We believe it was fired by a non-state actor,” the organization said in a statement. Israel and the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah have been clashing in southern Lebanon, and the U.N. force said that it had recorded “intense gunfire and explosions” close to its headquarters in the past two days.
The Israeli military said it has begun striking Hezbollah infrastructure in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, on Monday night. Residents reported three massive explosions within about 30 minutes coming from the southern suburbs, an area where Hezbollah holds sway.
An Iranian military spokesman, Ebrahim Zolfaghari, said on Monday that Iran maintains control of the Strait of Hormuz and can enforce security “without resorting to mine deployment,” according to Iranian state media.
Earlier this month, U.S. officials said that Iran had begun laying mines in the vital waterway. While the U.S. military said it had destroyed larger Iranian naval vessels that could be used to quickly lay mines in the strait, it added that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps could deploy hundreds, even thousands, of small boats for this purpose. Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, has denied that Iran was mining the strait.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said he had spoken with President Trump on Monday, and that Trump believed it was possible to “leverage” the military achievements in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran to “realize the objectives of the war in an agreement.” Netanyahu’s comments, in a video statement, appeared to refer obliquely to Trump’s assertion that negotiations with Iran were underway. He said Israel would nonetheless continue to strike in Iran and Lebanon. “We will preserve our vital interests in every situation,” he said.
The Israeli military said on Monday evening that it had completed a wave of strikes “in the heart of Tehran,” including targeting what it said was the “main security headquarters” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. U.S. Central Command similarly said that U.S. forces were continuing to “aggressively strike Iranian military targets” in a post on social media on Monday. Iranian officials also said on state-run media that they launched another wave of attacks.
Senior military officials are weighing a possible deployment of a combat brigade from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and some elements of the division’s headquarters staff to support U.S. military operations in Iran, defense officials said.
The officials described the military’s actions as prudent planning, noting that nothing had been ordered by the Pentagon or U.S. Central Command, which declined to comment. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing planning.
The combat forces would come from the 82nd Airborne’s “Immediate Response Force,” a brigade of about 3,000 soldiers capable of deploying anywhere in the world within 18 hours. These forces could be used to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export hub.
Another possibility being considered, should President Trump authorize U.S. troops to seize the island, is an attack by about 2,500 troops from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is on its way to the region.
The airfield on Kharg Island was damaged by the recent U.S. bombing raids so former U.S. commanders said it was more likely to first bring in Marines, whose combat engineers could quickly repair airfields and other airport infrastructure. Once the airfield is repaired, the Air Force could start flowing matériel and supplies, as well as troops, if necessary, by C-130s.
In that scenario, it is possible that the troops from the 82nd Airborne would augment the Marines. The upside of going with paratroopers is they can arrive overnight. The downside is they do not bring any heavy equipment, such as heavily armored vehicles, that would offer protection if Iranian forces counterattacked, current and former officials said.
The Marines lack the sustainment and staying power of the forces from the 82nd Airborne, which could be used to relieve the Marine forces after the initial attack on the island, current and former officials said.
The headquarters element from the 82nd Airborne would be used as a subordinate headquarters for mission planning and coordination in what is becoming an increasingly complex battle space. In early March, the Army abruptly canceled the 300-member headquarters’s participation in an exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Fort Polk, La.
Army officials said they made the decision to keep the division’s command element at Fort Bragg, N.C., just in case the Pentagon ordered the ready brigade to the Middle East. The command did not want to have its headquarters caught out of place if the balloon went up for them. The cancellation was reported earlier by The Washington Post.
The 82nd Airborne Division’s Immediate Response Force, or ready brigade, has deployed on short notice several times in recent years, including to the Middle East in January 2020 after the Baghdad Embassy was attacked, to Afghanistan in August 2021 for evacuations and to Eastern Europe in 2022 to support operations in Ukraine.
President Trump’s order to postpone strikes on Iran’s power plants gives the country a small reprieve, but U.S. and Israeli strikes have already battered critical infrastructure and stoked popular outrage over the war, even among Iranians who oppose their government.
Mr. Trump and Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, have at times urged Iranians to rise up against their government, but the U.S.-Israeli attacks are angering Iranians already struggling with the conflict’s devastating cost.
The attacks are also drawing international criticism. Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, warned on Monday that “what we have seen in recent days in the Middle East risks reaching a point of no return.”
“War on essential infrastructure is war on civilians,” she said in a statement. “It must stop. Every effort to de-escalate is critical.”
Overnight Sunday into Monday, parts of the capital, Tehran, were plunged into darkness. It wasn’t clear what caused the blackout, but Israel had said earlier that it would target the city’s infrastructure, without offering specifics.
On Saturday, strikes on Andimeshk, in southwestern Iran, damaged the city’s only hospital, according to Iranian media. And strikes last Wednesday on the South Pars offshore gas field, a cornerstone of Iran’s domestic energy supply, sparked widespread fears of an energy crisis in the country.
Israeli strikes on Tehran’s fuel depots turned the skies orange and enveloped the capital in toxic fumes and acid rain. And on the very first day of the war, a U.S. strike on a girls’ elementary school killed some 175 people, most of them children.
Mr. Trump’s threats to attack power plants if Iran didn’t open the Strait of Hormuz rattled even vehement critics of the government who have vocally supported the U.S.-Israeli campaign.
Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed Shah, urged the United States and Israel to distinguish between attacking the Iranian people and the country’s government, while the activist Masih Alinejad asked that attacks spare infrastructure that more than 90 million people depend on.
Omid Memarian, a senior Iran analyst at DAWN, a nonprofit in Washington, said the strikes reflected a failed strategy by Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu.
The attacks, he said, “have achieved what the Islamic Republic had long tried and failed to do: convincing people that the military campaign is not against the government, but against the Iranian people, the Iranian state, and their very existence.”
In a social media post on Monday, Mr. Trump said he had postponed his ultimatum to allow five days of talks with Iran over ending hostilities. Iranian officials have publicly dismissed it as a ploy ahead of further U.S. attacks.
Iran is already retaliating against strikes, including attacking a Bahraini desalination plant after Iranian desalination facilities were struck. Iranian officials have warned those efforts would become more aggressive if their own infrastructure came under attack, potentially destabilizing the region even more.
Esfandyar Batmanghedilij, who heads the economic think tank Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, argued that if Washington had followed through with Mr. Trump’s threats, it could have drastically escalated the level of attacks.
He noted that Iran had nearly 500 power plants, compared to 50 in Israel. The largest Iranian plant only provides 4 percent of Iran’s total capacity, he wrote, while Israel’s largest plant provides a fifth of the country’s energy.
“If Trump hits a major power plant, Iran will respond by hitting utilities in the Gulf states and Israel — including power plants and desalination facilities — and will count on the fact that it has to hit fewer targets to have a bigger impact,” he said.
Sanam Mahoozi contributed reporting
The energy crisis caused by the Iran war is worse than the combined effect of the oil shocks in the 1970s, the leader of the International Energy Agency said on Monday, warning that it would take time to resolve even if the war were to end soon.
Fatih Birol, the executive director of the I.E.A., accused global decision makers of not appreciating the severity of the crisis. Speaking at an event in Canberra, Australia, he added that his agency, an organization of 32 nations, was in talks with governments in Asia and Europe about releasing more oil from their strategic reserves. Less than two weeks ago, it coordinated the biggest release of stockpiled oil in history.
“If it is necessary, of course, we will do it,” he said.
Mr. Birol cautioned that the severity of the shock meant that even once the fighting ended, the market would not recover quickly. “It will take some time to come back to the normal days we had before the war was started,” he said.
Hours later, international oil prices fell more than 10 percent after President Trump said the United States and Iran had held productive talks on ending the war. But Iran denied that discussions had taken place, and Mr. Trump has made conflicting statements throughout the war, highlighting the uncertainty that still hangs over the conflict and energy markets.
International oil prices spiked again early Monday, with the international benchmark crude topping $114 a barrel and then falling to around $100.
Iran has retaliated against U.S. and Israeli airstrikes by effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz, which accounts for about a fifth of oil transport, and targeting the energy infrastructure of American allies in the Persian Gulf.
Mr. Birol said he had refrained from speaking out publicly for the first three weeks of the war, but he was now ratcheting up his warnings about the lasting effects on oil and gas supplies and prices on the global economy. Last week, he told The Financial Times that the war in Iran was the biggest threat to global energy security in history.
On Monday, he said the war had caused the global oil supply to drop by 11 million barrels a day, more than 10 percent, compared with a loss of 10 million barrels per day from the oil shocks in 1973 and 1979 combined.
Mr. Birol added that the conflict in the Middle East had had a bigger impact on natural gas supplies than Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Iran’s retaliation against Israeli strikes on its energy infrastructure has included targeting the Ras Laffan complex in Qatar, the world’s largest liquefied natural gas processor. Qatar is the world’s third largest exporter of L.N.G. and a major supplier to Europe and Asia. The attacks have knocked out about 17 percent of the country’s L.N.G. export capacity and could take up to five years to restore it, according to Saad al-Kaabi, Qatar’s energy minister.
Mr. Birol made his comments at the start of a global tour that he kicked off in the Asia-Pacific region, which relies heavily on oil and other commodities that are shipped through the Strait of Hormuz.
Israel’s military said on Monday that its own errant artillery had killed an Israeli avocado farmer a day earlier near the Lebanese border.
Tributes rolled in for the farmer, Ofer Moskovitz, a colorful raconteur who was killed on Sunday in Misgav Am, a kibbutz on the border with Lebanon. He was buried an hour south by car, in Kibbutz Amiad, near the Sea of Galilee.
Mr. Moskovitz, 60, who was better known as “Poshko,” had been featured in the Israeli news in recent days as a spokesman for Misgav Am, a tiny, 400-person community. He described how Israelis along the border cope with danger and how he could see Hezbollah flags hanging on Lebanese homes.
“A missile or a drone could fall on me at any moment. It’s Russian roulette,” he told a Haifa radio station in an interview on Friday, according to Ynet, an Israeli news site.
Hezbollah announced that it had fired a rocket barrage at Misgav Am at 8 a.m. on Sunday, and the Israeli military initially said that Mr. Moskovitz, who was riding in a car that was blown up, was killed in that attack.
Late Sunday, however, the military said it was investigating the possibility that Mr. Moskovitz had been killed by its own mistaken fire. And on Monday, it said an initial review had shown flaws in the planning and execution of its artillery fire, which was meant to support Israeli troops in southern Lebanon.
Five rounds fired “at an incorrect angle” were aimed at the Misgav Am ridge instead of toward the enemy target, the military said in a statement. It offered an apology to Mr. Moskovitz’s family and to the Misgav Am community.
Reached hours after the funeral on Monday, Mr. Moskovitz’s older brother, Ron Moskovitz, 63, said that the family harbored no animosity toward the soldiers responsible.
“In war, these are things that happen,” he said. “I, as a soldier or an officer — this could have happened to me, too. So I asked: Who are the people who are walking around with feelings of guilt? And we asked to pass on to them, to tell them, that we’re sending them a hug — because they, too, are victims of what happened.”
But Mr. Moskovitz was less forgiving of Israel’s political leadership. “The residents of the North were promised that the threat had been removed,” he noted, recalling a string of similarly triumphant — and, it turned out, false — assurances from the government.
“People want to be told the truth,” he added. “There are nuances, there are complexities. Leaders who are incapable of communicating complexity to their people — they should not be leaders.”
Mr. Moskovitz described his brother as larger than life, with unusual charisma and a wonderful sense of humor. He had arrived in Misgav Am for his military service and stayed afterward, serving as an unofficial spokesman for the Upper Galilee region and especially for its farmers.
He celebrated the birth of his second grandchild only last week.
“It’s an extreme transition from joy to sorrow that you can only understand if you’re Israeli,” Mr. Moskovitz said.
The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross said on Monday that “war on essential infrastructure is war on civilians,” citing attacks on energy, water and healthcare facilities in the Middle East. President Trump has threatened to strike Iran’s energy infrastructure, and Israel has done so. Iran has hit water desalination plants, and oil and gas facilities in multiple countries, and has threatened more such attacks if its power grid is hit. “Most alarming is the potential harm to nuclear facilities,” the Red Cross president, Mirjana Spoljaric, said in a statement, warning of potentially “irreversible consequences.” The United States and Israel have attacked nuclear sites in Iran, and Iranian missiles have struck near Israel’s main nuclear facility.
Britain’s government is looking at measures to prevent profiteering by companies as a result of the spike in energy prices caused by conflict in Middle East, Prime Minister Keir Starmer told senior lawmakers. One issue is whether the country’s antitrust agency should be given more “teeth” to prevent “price gouging or profiteering,” he said.
The Lebanese health ministry said a person was killed in a strike on an apartment in Hazmieh, east of Beirut, according to the country’s state-run National News Agency. The Israeli military said the attack was targeting a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has helped Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, fight against Israel.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain told senior lawmakers that his government was aware of talks between the U.S. and Iran and that the priority was to achieve “a negotiated agreement which puts tight conditions on Iran particularly in relation to nuclear weapons.” While Starmer said he hoped for a swift end to hostilities, he added that, in terms of the potential economic impact, he had “to plan on the basis there may not be.”
Mike Wirth, the chief executive of U.S. oil giant Chevron, said that he does not think the fall in oil prices on Monday reflected how much pressure the war in the Middle East has put on the global energy market. “Physical supplies would reflect a tighter market than I think the forward curve reflects,” Wirth said at an energy conference in Houston, referring to Brent Crude futures, the global benchmark, which tumbled to about $100 a barrel after President Trump said the United States and Iran had productive talks on ending the war. Iran denied that talks had taken place.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright was appearing at CERAWeek, the oil and gas industry’s most important annual conference. He sought to make the case for the conflict with Iran to energy companies, many of whose operations have been severely disrupted by the war over recent weeks. “This is a conflict that we simply couldn’t kick down the road,” Wright said. “There are short-term disruptions right now, but to end a multi-decadal problem and lead to a world that’s much more peaceful.”
The United States started releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on Friday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told a gathering of oil and gas executives in Houston on Monday. Wright predicted that the release of the emergency oil stockpiles, which had been announced this month in an effort to ease global supply constraints, would reach between 1 million and 1.5 million barrels per day.
Reporting from Damascus, Syria
The Israeli military struck the Dallafa Bridge in southern Lebanon on Monday, the latest in a series of strikes on vital transit routes in the area over recent days. Israeli officials say the attacks are aimed at Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed armed group, which it has accused of using the bridges to send fighters and weapons to the south to fight Israel. But Lebanese civilians have also used the bridges to escape the fighting in southern Lebanon, amid Israel’s intense bombardment.
President Trump told reporters that the U.S. and Iran had held “very strong talks” that would continue today by phone. He said his envoy, Steve Witkoff, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were leading the talks from the U.S. side, and had been dealing with a “top person” in Iran, but wouldn’t name the person. Trump said the person is not Iran’s supreme leader. Iran, at least publicly, appeared to reject any progress in ending the U.S.-Israeli war earlier on Monday.
U.S. stock markets opened up on Monday morning, with the S&P 500 up more than 1 percent and on course for its biggest rise since the start of the Iran war in late February. The rises follow President Trump’s claims that he ordered the U.S. military to postpone striking Iranian energy infrastructure for five days after constructive talks with Iran to end the war. Iranian officials denied any talks had taken place.
S&P 500
The administration has pointed to the importance of the 10-year yield before. It is a crucial reference interest rate around the world, underpinning corporate and consumer interest rates from business loans to home mortgages. Trump wants a lower 10-year yield, which would help with affordability by reducing the cost of a mortgage and other types of borrowing. But the Iran war has been inflationary, and the typical way to deal with inflation is to raise interest rates. Ahead of the midterms, some investors expect Trump’s focus to shift back to his domestic policy agenda.
Before President Trump’s announcement about talks with Iran to end the war, the 10-year Treasury yield, which reflects government borrowing costs over a decade, rose past 4.40 percent for the first time this year, and was close to crossing the 4.5 percent threshold before Trump issued his statement. This is around the same level that prompted Trump to cite the bond market when he pulled back from his initial tariff announcement last April.
Oil prices tumbled and stocks jumped on Monday after President Trump backed away from a threat to strike Iranian energy infrastructure and pushed the prospect of peace talks, a sharp shift from his statements over the weekend.
Mr. Trump had said on Saturday that U.S. forces would start attacking Iranian power plants on Monday unless Iran fully reopened the Strait of Hormuz. After a wave of strikes knocked out power across large parts of Tehran on Monday, Mr. Trump pivoted and promised a five-day moratorium on any U.S. attacks on energy sites, citing “productive” talks between the two countries.
Markets whipsawed, and, though Iranian officials said no such talks had taken place, the gains in stocks and drop in oil at least partly held.
“The market conclusion is that the U.S. would like to avoid the economic consequences of the conflict escalating,” said Kit Juckes, a strategist at the bank Société Générale.
The S&P 500 rose as much as 2.2 percent, before easing to a gain of 1.15 percent. That was still the index’s best day since the war began, paring losses since it started to 4.3 percent.
Stocks in Europe also rose. In Asia, where markets had closed before Mr. Trump’s statement on Iran, markets across the region had ended the day with a sharp decline: The worst performer was the Kospi index in South Korea, which plummeted 6.5 percent.
Mr. Trump’s remarks also helped fuel a drop in oil prices.
Brent crude, the global benchmark, fell over 10 percent to settle at $99.94 a barrel, below $100 for the first time in almost two weeks but still almost 38 percent higher since the war with Iran started.
Price of Brent Crude Oil
For some investors, Mr. Trump’s about-face is further evidence of the markets’ power over his administration. While Mr. Trump may try to portray himself as unrestrained, the sharp rise in oil prices and interest rates in recent weeks is seen by some market watchers as pushing the president into remarks meant to help ease investors’ worries.
Before Mr. Trump’s comments, the 10-year Treasury yield, which reflects government borrowing costs and underpins the cost of debt across the economy, had come close to crossing 4.5 percent for the first time this year.
That’s a sharp increase from where it was before the war, and around the same level that prompted Mr. Trump to explicitly reference the bond market when he pulled back from the first round of tariff announcements that had sent markets reeling last April.
The yield retreated from its high after Mr. Trump announced talks with Iran were underway, with the 10-year Treasury yield down to 4.35 percent.
However, for other investors, Tehran’s pushback will also serve as a sign that the war in Iran — unlike Venezuela, for example — is not entirely under Mr. Trump’s control. That’s particularly important when it comes to the price of oil and worries about inflation — and the potential for those to push up interest rates in the United States.