Dow futures drop 200 points as Trump weighs attack on Iran: Live updates

CNBC5 hours ago

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on April 2, 2025.
NYSE
Stock futures were lower ahead of Friday's session, with investors monitoring conflict in the Middle East between Iran and Israel, and potential direct U.S. involvement.
Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 221 points, or 0.5%. Nasdaq 100 futures ticked down 0.6%%, while S&P 500 futures fell 0.4%. Regular trading was closed in the U.S. on Thursday for the Juneteenth holiday.
Investors remain jittery as the conflict between Israel and Iran has yet to cool. President Donald Trump is weighing direct U.S. involvement with a strike on Tehran, with the White House on Thursday saying that he will make a final decision within the next two weeks. Trump previously called for Tehran's complete surrender, to which Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, labeled the notion "threatening and ridiculous."
International benchmark Brent as well U.S. crude oil , which initially spiked following the onset of Israel's missile strike on Iran, climbed roughly 3% on Thursday, on the possibility of U.S. jumping into the conflict. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly ordering Jerusalem's military to strike "strategic targets" in Iran, as well as "government targets."
"There are several key questions to answer before we know how stocks will handle this geopolitical shock, including how much of Iran's energy infrastructure will be impaired and for how long, whether Iran's nuclear capabilities will be completely wiped out, and whether the current regime will remain in power," said Jeff Buchbinder, chief equity strategist for LPL Financial.
The still-simmering tension in the Middle East comes as investors also weighed comments from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday, following the central banks decision to hold interest rates steady. Stocks closed lower following Powell's comments, which essentially said that the Fed is in no hurry to cut benchmark rates and will remain data dependent, especially as it remains unclear how Trump's tariffs will impact the economy.
Trump ripped into Powell again Thursday, saying the Fed Chair is costing the U.S. "hundreds of billions of dollars" by delaying rate cuts.
For the week, the S&P 500 is up marginally with a gain of 0.07%. The 30-stock Dow has lost 0.06%, while the Nasdaq has advanced about 1%.
On the economic front, investors will monitor the Philadelphia Fed's manufacturing survey on Friday morning, followed by the Conference Board's leading economic indicators reading for May.

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Don't fall for ‘regime change' myths — US power is a force for good

New York Post

17 minutes ago

New York Post

Don't fall for ‘regime change' myths — US power is a force for good

MAGA celebrity Charlie Kirk, attempting to balance support for the administration and appeal to online isolationists, maintains that the 'regime change war machine in DC' is pushing President Donald Trump into 'an all-out blitz on Iran.' He's not alone. The question is, what does 'regime change war' mean in simple language? Does it mean, as 'non-interventionists' suggest, invading Iran and imposing American democracy on its people? Because, if so, there's virtually no one pushing for that. And I only add 'virtually' in case I somehow missed a person of consequence, though it is highly unlikely. Trump, from all indications, is using the threat of the US joining the war to push Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei into surrender. Though taking out Iran's nuclear program would end the war quicker. Or does opposing 'regime change' mean actively thwarting the Iranian opposition from overthrowing the fundamentalists who took power via a violent revolution in 1979? Does it mean ensuring that Khamenei survives, because a resulting messy post-war fight for power is worse? It seems the latter. Kirk says, 'There is a vast difference between a popular revolution and foreign-imposed, abrupt, violent regime change.' Surely, he doesn't believe the mullahs will gradually propose liberal reforms for the people and become peaceful neighbors on their own? If Iranians revolt, it's because of the violence now being imposed on the regime. The ideological overcorrection due to the failures of Iraq's rebuild now has non-interventionists accusing anyone who proposes that it's better if anti-American dictatorships fall of being 'neocons,' perhaps the most useless phrase in our political lexicon. Forget for a moment that Iran has been an enemy of the United States for 45 years. Not an existential threat, no, but a deadly one, nonetheless. The non-interventionist is not bothered by the Islamic Republic's murder of American citizens, or its crusade for nuclear weapons — until Khamenei drops Revolutionary Guard paratroopers into San Diego, they don't think it's any of our business. Because of this overcorrection, non-interventionists, both left and right, simply can't fathom that exertion of American power could ever be a good thing. They now create revisionist histories blaming the United States for virtually all the world's ills. 'It was Britain, and (funded by) the United States that overthrew a democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mossedegh in 1953 by using hired mobs in a coup that lead [sic] to the installation of the Shah Pahlavi's 27 year reign of authoritarianism and human rights abuses,' wrote Trump-supporting comedian Rob Schneider in a viral post. 'All in the name of Iranian Oil.' 'Remember,' Kirk told his followers, 'Iran is partially controlled by mullahs today because we designed regime change to put the shah back in power.' Boy, I wish people would stay off Wikipedia for a while, because this fantasy, spread by blame-America leftists for decades, is now being picked up by the right. The notion that Iran would have been a thriving democracy in 1954 had the US not gotten involved — and our involvement is way overstated — is more ridiculous than blaming us for the 1979 revolution nearly 30 years later. It is far more likely Iran would have emerged as a Soviet client state, destined to fall anyway when fundamentalists swept the Islamic world in the 1970s. Realpolitik is ugly. Non-interventionists love to harp on the deadly byproducts of our intrusions into world affairs — and there have been many — without ever grappling with the counterfactual outcome. For instance, the contention that 'regime change' never works is incredibly simplistic. Regime change was a success in Germany and Japan. And I bet the Hungarians, Czechs, Slovenians, Estonians and many others were all on board for regime change, as well. None of that happens without US intervention in conflicts, cold and hot, around the world. People will rightly point out that Europe is not the Middle East. In that regard, Iran is not Iraq or Syria. Schneider contends that '90 million people will fight for their survival again,' as they did in Iraq. Sure, some Iranians might fight to preserve the brutal Islamic regime. Many would not. The real fear should be that a civil war would break out if Iran's regime collapses. There are numerous minorities in Iran, but Persian national consciousness goes back to antiquity. If the mullahs fall, a majority of Iranians may turn out to fight for a better life free of needless conflicts with the West. It may go south. It may not. I have no idea how that turns out, and neither do you. Except for one thing: Whoever wins won't have nuclear weapons. David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner.