A Ceasefire in the Gulf, a Reshuffle at the Fed: The Strait of Hormuz reopens on paper while Warsh quietly rebuilds the Fed's playbook from the inside.

Two very different de-escalations defined June. In the Gulf, the U.S. and regional parties signed a memorandum of understanding on June 17 aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and the International Maritime Organization began coordinating evacuations of the ships and mariners that had been stranded there since February. Crossings ticked up. It was progress — but as we'll see next month, progress in a conflict zone is rarely a straight line.

At the Fed, Chair Warsh used June to do something less dramatic but arguably more important for long-term positioning: he announced five internal task forces covering communications, the balance sheet, data sources, productivity and jobs, and the inflation framework itself. That's not a rate decision, but it's a signal. A chair rebuilding the Fed's internal frameworks this early in his term is a chair planning to be there a while and planning to change how the institution operates, not just where rates sit this quarter.

For investors, June was a month to exhale without getting comfortable. Oil gave back a meaningful chunk of its war premium as the MOU news landed, which took pressure off inflation-sensitive sectors. But a memorandum of understanding is not a peace treaty, and an internal Fed task force takes months to produce anything actionable. We used the relative calm to rebalance — trimming energy overweights that had done their job during the worst of the crisis and rebuilding some of the value and cyclical exposure that had lagged during the flight to safety.