Trump pulled back from Yemen, oil cratered, and Meta's Muse repriced the chip trade

Per the New York Times: target lists were approved and bombs were being loaded onto US warplanes for a strike on Houthi positions in Yemen, requested by Saudi Arabia after Saturday's intercepted Houthi attack on Riyadh — then Trump reversed by midday Sunday, with his inner circle reportedly wary of deepening US involvement while the broader Iran war continues. Separately, Trump said he'd be open to meeting Iran's President Pezeshkian this week at the UN General Assembly, even as he warned Tehran's economy would be left to "rot" without a deal. WTI settled near $92.3, Brent near $96.1 — the sharpest single-day oil move this month.

Muse, Meta's AI agent — it completes tasks like sending emails, booking travel and making purchases rather than just answering questions — launched 8 September and hit number one on both the US Apple App Store and Google Play by today, with more than 900,000 downloads in its first six days, ahead of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and even Meta's own Instagram on the iOS chart. Amazon began blocking Muse from its platform over the weekend after Meta declined to pull it, saying third-party apps that transact on a customer's behalf should "operate openly and respect service provider decisions." Meta closed up 11.34%, its best day since last August. Because agents like Muse lean on CPUs rather than just GPUs, the same read repriced CPU-demand bets across the chip sector: Arm +17.16%, Intel +12.14%, AMD +9.95% to a fresh record and briefly a $1 trillion market cap — with the SOX index up only about 3%, evidence the move was CPU-specific rather than a broad semis rally.

The S&P 500 rose 1.49%, the Nasdaq 100 2.83%, the VIX roughly flat at 14.87. The curve eased modestly — the 10-year down 5bp to 4.96%, the 30-year down 5bp — and gold fell nearly 1% as the risk-off hedge unwound.