President Donald Trump convened his Cabinet on Friday at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, as the war he launched against Iran continues to expand with no clear resolution in sight, according to reporting from Reuters and NBC News.

The meeting marked the 13th Cabinet gathering of Trump’s second term and his third trip to Camp David since returning to office, a notable departure for a president who has largely avoided the mountaintop retreat in favor of his own golf resorts when not at the White House, according to Reuters. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had told reporters ahead of the gathering that hosting the meeting at Camp David would be “a lot of fun and something different for the cabinet to experience together.” The agenda for the meeting was expected to focus heavily on foreign policy, according to Reuters.

The gathering came at a difficult moment for the administration’s stated goals on Iran. Trump had previously predicted the conflict would conclude within “weeks,” but the war has instead continued expanding without an endgame in sight, according to NBC News. Little progress has been made toward stopping Iran from threatening commercial shipping and slowing traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the critical Persian Gulf waterway through which a significant share of the world’s oil normally flows.

The conflict has continued widening in the days leading up to Friday’s meeting. On Tuesday, the U.S. military intercepted a new round of Iranian ballistic missile attacks in Jordan, ending what had been a brief respite in the fighting, according to NBC News. On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia, which had previously remained reluctant to become directly involved, entered the conflict by conducting airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in Iraq that Riyadh accused of attacking its oil facilities. Saudi Arabia’s defense minister also met privately with Trump around the same time. The following day, the Saudi Ministry of Defense announced it would lead a new multinational coalition aimed at protecting shipping routes in the Red Sea and other regional waterways amid repeated attacks by Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen, adding further pressure on maritime trade even as Iran continues to threaten the Strait of Hormuz separately.

Friday’s Cabinet meeting followed the last such gathering on May 27, during which Trump had asserted that the Strait of Hormuz would soon be “open to everybody” and that gasoline prices would fall sharply, predictions that have not materialized in the months since, according to NBC News. U.S. economic growth has slowed since that earlier meeting, and inflation remains stuck above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target rate, with consumer prices continuing to run elevated. Trump’s approval rating has fallen to a record low of 32%, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll cited by NBC News, adding domestic political pressure to the administration’s efforts to resolve the conflict before its economic ripple effects cause further damage.

The Cabinet meeting came just days after Trump held separate meetings with two other heads of state whose countries are themselves engaged in ongoing conflicts but who now share a common adversary in Iran. Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier in the week, according to NBC News, discussions that occurred against the backdrop of the broader regional instability tied to the widening Iran conflict.

Trump has continued to publicly project confidence about the trajectory of the war even as the underlying military and diplomatic situation has grown more complicated. During an earlier Cabinet meeting in March, held shortly after the U.S. and Israel first began attacking Iran on Feb. 28, Trump suggested online and during the meeting itself that Iran had been “obliterated,” that its leaders were “begging” for a deal, and that a resolution was near, according to the Los Angeles Times. Those characterizations have not translated into a concluded conflict in the months since, with fighting instead continuing to spread to additional countries and threaten broader regional shipping and energy infrastructure.

Renewed strikes between the United States and Iran resumed earlier in the week following a brief pause, adding further urgency to Friday’s Cabinet discussions. The renewed hostilities have continued to affect global oil markets, even as prices have shown volatility tied both to the conflict itself and to broader questions about the durability of shipping disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.

With the war continuing to widen rather than resolve, and with domestic economic pressures mounting ahead of the November midterm elections, Friday’s Camp David gathering placed Trump and his top advisers under significant pressure to identify a viable path toward ending the conflict, particularly given the growing involvement of additional regional powers, including Saudi Arabia, and the continued absence of progress toward securing safe passage through the region’s most critical shipping corridors.

Chancellor John Healey has announced the date of his first Budget will be Wednesday, 28 October.

In a video message,  he said: “This will be a Budget that moves money and power out of Westminster, and into every postcode around Britain.

“It will be built on fiscal discipline. It will meet our fiscal rules. It’ll give businesses and families some of the stability they need to plan for the future. Now, let’s get on with the job.”

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said his government will stick to Labour’s fiscal rules on spending and borrowing as well as the party’s 2024 manifesto pledges not to increase income tax, VAT or national insurance contributions.

Burnham also said he will honour the fiscal rules imposed by Healey’s predecessor Rachel Reeves, which include a pledge to balance day-to-day spending with tax revenues by the end of the decade.

An influential think tank said earlier this week that the prime minister only has a small margin of error to do this, and that Healey may have to cut spending or raise taxes to meet Burnham’s policy priorities such as such as extra defence spending and better social care.

Healey was Defence Secretary under Keir Starmer, but resigned after a row over defence spending commitments – saying he was “certain” that Britain shouldl lift its spending to 3% by 2030.

But questioned about funding on Thursday, Burnham’s Defence Secretary Wes Streeting repeatedly refused to commit to that target.

“Before we set out specific spending commitments, we will also set out how we pay for them at the same time,” he said.

NEW YORK — Amazon.com Inc. shares surged nearly 15% on Friday, climbing $34.79 to $270.29, after the company reported second-quarter results that showed its cloud computing division accelerating at the fastest pace in more than four years, easing investor concerns that heavy spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure was not yet generating sufficient returns.

The rally, one of the stock’s strongest single-day performances in years, added roughly $300 billion to Amazon’s market value and helped lift broader technology indexes. Investors focused on robust demand at Amazon Web Services, the company’s most profitable segment, rather than a higher capital expenditure forecast or a swing into negative free cash flow driven by AI investments.

Amazon reported net sales of $200.6 billion for the quarter ended June 30, up 20% from $167.7 billion a year earlier and above analysts’ consensus estimates near $196 billion to $197 billion. Operating income rose 43% to $27.5 billion. Diluted earnings per share reached $5.75, far exceeding the roughly $1.82 Wall Street expected, though the figure included a large non-operating gain primarily from the mark-up of Amazon’s investment in Anthropic.

The standout was Amazon Web Services. AWS revenue jumped 37% to $42.2 billion, or 36.7% on a year-over-year basis, marking the unit’s strongest growth in 18 quarters and its fifth consecutive quarter of acceleration. The cloud business generated an annualized revenue run rate of $169 billion. Operating income for AWS climbed to $16.6 billion, producing a 39.4% operating margin, up substantially from the year-ago period.

Amazon said its AI and custom chips businesses each surpassed annualized revenue run rates of more than $25 billion, both growing at triple-digit percentages. The AWS contract backlog expanded to $496 billion.

“AWS is booming, growing 36.7% year-over-year in Q2 — our fastest growth in 18 quarters — and our AI and Chips businesses each eclipsed run rates of more than $25 billion,” Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy said in the company’s statement. “In Stores, we again set record delivery speeds for Prime members in the first half of the year — over 40% more items delivered same-day or overnight, with Grocery and Everyday Essentials growing meaningfully faster than the rest of the business. And, Advertising had another strong quarter with 26% year-over-year growth. There’s a lot to be excited about, and we have much more coming for customers in the second half of the year and beyond.”

Jassy told investors on the earnings call that demand for computing capacity remains so strong that Amazon still cannot fully meet customer needs despite raising its 2026 capital expenditure outlook. The company now expects cash capital expenditures of approximately $220 billion for the year, up from a prior estimate of about $200 billion. Higher memory costs contributed to the increase. Much of the spending is directed toward AI infrastructure.

“Even at that amount, we will still not have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026,” Jassy said. “I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027 too.” He added that the “lion’s share” of planned AWS capacity for 2027 has already been reserved by customers, with substantial commitments extending into 2028. Jassy has described Amazon as “unusually well-positioned for this AI inflection.”

The results arrived amid intense scrutiny of Big Tech’s AI spending. Microsoft and Alphabet earlier reported strong cloud growth, while some peers saw their shares pressured by higher capital plans and weaker free cash flow. Amazon’s free cash flow turned negative, with a trailing twelve-month outflow of $7.6 billion compared with an $18.2 billion inflow a year earlier, reflecting a $66.1 billion year-over-year rise in equipment purchases tied largely to AI.

Investors largely looked past those figures. Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney called the quarter “the breakout that the stock needed,” noting that AWS delivered its strongest growth in 18 quarters while expanding operating margins. JPMorgan analysts raised their price target to $365 from $330, saying they were “encouraged by the strength in the core AWS business, which has a high correlation with AI revenue,” and that they expect the relationship to strengthen as more AI workloads move into production.

At least a dozen brokerages lifted price targets following the report. Amazon’s price-to-earnings ratio stood near 25, still above some peers but reflecting renewed confidence in the company’s ability to monetize AI investments.

Other parts of the business also contributed. North America sales rose 16% to $116.2 billion. International sales increased 15% to $42.2 billion. Advertising revenue grew 26%. Amazon continued to emphasize faster delivery speeds and expansion in grocery and everyday essentials. The company highlighted progress with its Trainium custom chips, Graviton processors, Amazon Bedrock foundation model platform, and new agentic AI tools.

For the third quarter, Amazon guided net sales between $197 billion and $202 billion, representing 9% to 12% growth, or nearly 400 basis points higher when adjusting for the timing of Prime Day. Operating income is expected between $22.5 billion and $26.5 billion. The guidance incorporates an estimated 80-basis-point headwind from foreign exchange rates.

Amazon’s results underscored a shift in investor focus across the sector. After months of debate over whether vast AI capital outlays would deliver timely returns, the combination of accelerating AWS growth, expanding margins, and visible demand for both AI and core cloud services provided tangible evidence that spending was translating into revenue. The company noted that data centers typically require about two years of lead time before generating revenue but can operate for decades, while AI servers often recover their costs in under three years.

Shares had closed at $235.50 on Thursday before the after-hours and Friday surge. The move ranked among the largest percentage gains for Amazon in recent years and positioned the stock near multi-month highs. Volume was elevated as the company became one of the day’s most actively traded names and a leading contributor to gains in the Nasdaq 100 and S&P 500.

The performance also reflected broader market dynamics. Technology stocks led U.S. equity futures higher, with the Amazon rally offsetting softer moves in other names. Analysts noted that the quarter helped distinguish Amazon’s approach — tying incremental capital spending closely to existing customer demand and backlog — from peers still facing questions about the timeline of AI monetization.

Amazon continues to expand its AI-related offerings, including additional foundation models on Bedrock, new agent capabilities, and infrastructure tailored for agentic workloads. Commitments from major AI labs and enterprise customers for both cloud capacity and custom silicon have reinforced management’s confidence in multi-year demand.

While free cash flow remains under pressure in the near term and third-quarter guidance came in somewhat softer than some estimates on a reported basis, the market’s reaction centered on the acceleration in AWS and the visibility provided by the growing backlog. For investors who have watched Big Tech pour hundreds of billions into AI infrastructure this year, Amazon’s report offered the clearest signal yet that those investments are beginning to show measurable returns in both growth and profitability.

The stock’s sharp advance on Friday closed a volatile stretch for the shares and reinforced Amazon’s central role in the ongoing AI infrastructure build-out.

Apple shares fell 9.56% in Friday afternoon trading, dropping $31.88 to $301.55, despite the company reporting a record fiscal third-quarter 2026 performance, as investors focused instead on weaker-than-expected results from Apple’s Services division and its China business.

The decline came just days after Apple had briefly reached a $5 trillion market capitalization for the first time and reclaimed the title of world’s most valuable publicly traded company from Nvidia. Rick Rodda, an analyst quoted by TheStreet, framed the market’s disappointment against that backdrop of elevated expectations. “Its stock was sitting just below record highs going into earnings, having cleared the $5 trillion valuation hurdle again and reclaiming the title of world’s most valuable public company,” Rodda said. “The results appear not quite good enough to justify such lofty valuations.”

Apple’s results themselves showed strength across most major financial metrics, even as the market reaction proved sharply negative. The company beat expectations on the majority of its headline numbers, according to Rodda, but stumbled specifically in its Services division and in China, a market facing intense competitive pressure from domestic smartphone manufacturers. That combination of a broadly strong quarter paired with two notable soft spots proved sufficient to trigger a steep selloff in the stock, even though the underlying fiscal quarter set a company record.

The China weakness comes as Apple continues navigating an increasingly competitive smartphone market in the country, where domestic manufacturers Huawei and other local brands have continued gaining market share. Earlier reporting on China’s broader smartphone market showed Huawei and Apple both extending gains during the second quarter of 2026, even as the overall Chinese smartphone market contracted amid rising memory chip prices that pushed manufacturers toward more conservative production strategies. Despite that broader industry backdrop, Apple’s specific results in China during its own fiscal third quarter fell short of what investors had been expecting heading into Thursday’s earnings release.

Apple’s Services division, which includes revenue from the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud storage subscriptions, Apple TV+ and other subscription-based offerings, has increasingly become a focus for investors given its higher profit margins compared with Apple’s hardware business. A shortfall in that segment specifically raised questions among analysts about the near-term trajectory of one of the company’s most closely watched growth drivers, even as the company’s overall hardware business, including iPhone sales, appeared to hold up reasonably well during the quarter.

Friday’s decline stood in stark contrast to the reaction that greeted Amazon’s own earnings, released the same evening as Apple’s results. Amazon shares surged as much as 12% Friday, according to 24/7 Wall St., after the company delivered a blowout quarter powered substantially by strength in Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing division. The 24/7 Wall St. analysis characterized the split between Apple and Amazon’s earnings reactions as reflecting a single underlying macroeconomic theme playing out in opposite directions: both companies face the same tight global supply of memory chips and advanced semiconductors driven by surging demand tied to artificial intelligence, but Amazon has been able to convert that dynamic into stronger cloud revenue growth, while Apple has faced more direct cost and margin pressure on the hardware side of its business as component prices have climbed.

The Invesco QQQ Trust, an exchange-traded fund tracking the Nasdaq 100 that holds both Apple and Amazon among its largest individual weightings, found itself caught between the two companies’ sharply offsetting moves Friday, according to 24/7 Wall St., muting what would otherwise have been a cleaner overall gain for the technology-focused fund following the mixed earnings reactions.

Apple’s earnings arrived as part of one of the busiest stretches of corporate earnings season for major technology companies, with Amazon, Apple and Coinbase all reporting results after Thursday’s closing bell, following blockbuster results from Microsoft and Meta Platforms earlier in the week. Microsoft’s shares had surged roughly 15% Thursday for the company’s best single-day performance in nearly 18 years, after reporting that its Azure cloud computing division grew 43% during the quarter, a result that had helped fuel broader optimism across technology markets heading into Apple’s and Amazon’s reports.

Despite Friday’s sharp decline, Apple’s stock remains up substantially from levels earlier in the year, reflecting the broader rally that has characterized major technology stocks throughout much of 2026 amid continued investor enthusiasm for companies positioned to benefit from growing artificial intelligence infrastructure spending. Friday’s pullback illustrated, however, that even companies posting record financial results can face sharp market reactions when specific segments of their business fall short of elevated investor expectations, particularly for a company carrying the kind of premium valuation Apple has commanded following its recent run to record highs.

With Apple’s next quarterly earnings report still roughly three months away, investors are likely to watch closely in the interim for any additional commentary from company executives regarding the specific challenges facing its Services division and its competitive position in China, particularly given how directly both factors appeared to drive Friday’s sharp reversal in the stock despite the company’s otherwise record-setting quarterly performance.

It could secure £3.5bn of funding over the next four years based on its UK population share

What could a more effective relationship with three of the UK’s most powerful economic institutions be worth to Wales? Based on our share of the UK population, the answer could be around £3.5bn over the next four years.

This is not a guaranteed allocation but combines different forms of support, namely research investment from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), commercially repayable finance backed by the British Business Bank, and the loans, guarantees and insurance provided by UK Export Finance (UKEF). Nevertheless, it demonstrates the scale of the opportunity if Wales were to develop a coherent strategy for working with all three.

For much of the devolution era, political debate has concentrated on the block grant and money controlled directly by the Welsh Government. Far less attention has been paid to UK institutions whose decisions influence where research takes place, which businesses obtain finance, and which companies receive support to win international contracts.

This has become more relevant following Andy Burnham’s commitment to rebalance economic power and investment away from London and his establishment of No. 10 North and revival of a National Economic Council suggest that regional fairness will become an important test of UK economic policy.

That should be welcomed, but rebalancing the economy must also include a re-examination of the geographical impact of UK institutions shaping research, business investment and exports.

UKRI provides the first test as it will control £39bn between 2026-27 and 2029-30 with its new strategy connecting scientific discovery with commercialisation, company formation, private investment and industrial growth. Yet Wales currently receives only around 3 per cent of UKRI expenditure, and in 2023-24 received £168m, equivalent to £53 per person, compared with £134 per person across the UK.

If Wales increased its share of UKRI funding to its share of the UK population, it could generate around £500m to £600m in additional investment over four years. That would strengthen our underfunded universities, attract researchers, develop specialist facilities and help create companies in sectors where Wales has recognised strengths, including compound semiconductors, advanced materials, clean energy and creative technologies.

The second opportunity comes from the British Business Bank, whose permanent financial capacity has increased to £25.6bn and its planned activity between 2026-30 provides the most appropriate basis for estimating what Wales could receive.

During that period, the economic development bank of the UK Government, expects to make approximately £10.2bn of funded commitments and issue £8.4bn of guarantees, producing total financial activity of £18.6bn, and a share by population would be worth approximately £860m. To put that into context, that is around two and a half times the amount of non-property business finance provided by the Development Bank of Wales over the last four years.

The largest, but also the most uncertain, element of the opportunity comes from UKEF, which during 2025-26 provided £11.2bn in loans, guarantees and insurance, supporting 937 businesses and an estimated 85,000 jobs. Its statutory capacity has now doubled from £80bn to £160bn, and a 4.6 per cent share of the Welsh population in its current annual activity would be approximately £515m, or just over £2 billion across four years.

That figure must be treated carefully, as any spend can be transformed by a single major defence, aerospace, or infrastructure contract. Some activity is already taking place in Wales, so the entire amount is a benchmark against which Welsh access should be assessed over several years, not an entitlement.

To put the overall opportunity into perspective, the Welsh Government’s entire Economy, Energy and Planning budget for 2026-27 is approximately £843m and if maintained at that level, it would amount to around £3.4bn over four years. In other words, the potential £3.5bn Welsh share of UKRI, the British Business Bank and UKEF activity over four years is slightly greater than four years of spending through the Welsh Government’s whole economy, energy and planning portfolio.

The comparison is not exact and the Welsh budget finances public programmes, while much of the UK support takes the form of repayable lending, guarantees and insurance, but it demonstrates that securing a fair share of these institutions is not a peripheral issue and it could be as important to the Welsh economy as almost everything the Welsh Government itself spends on the economy.

The scale becomes clearer when compared with two of the most prominent demands in Welsh politics.

Plaid Cymru has campaigned for more than a decade for the devolution of the Crown Estate, while successive Welsh Governments have demanded a fair settlement from HS2. However, the Crown Estate generated an estimated £210m from its Welsh assets during 2025-26 and even if that unusually high level were sustained, four years of revenue would amount to around £840m, less than a quarter of the £3.5bn opportunity identified here.

The latest potential cost of HS2 is £102.7bn, of which a simple 4.6 per cent Welsh population share would be approximately £4.7bn , although that would relate to expenditure over the project’s lifetime rather than four years.

Securing a fair share of UKRI, British Business Bank and UKEF activity could therefore be worth considerably more than four years of current Crown Estate profits and approach the total value of Wales’s disputed share of HS2, and yet it has attracted only a fraction of the same political attention.

And the timing couldn’t be better with a new Prime Minister who has placed fairness between the UK’s nations and regions at the centre of his economic agenda. Indeed, that commitment must mean more than moving Whitehall from London to Manchester, and must instead change how the power of UKRI, the British Business Bank and UKEF is fairly distributed.

That will mean not only does Wales get the prize of £3.5bn of financial activity, but also ensure that research is commercialised, businesses are created and scaled, international orders are won, and well-paid jobs are generated across the nation.