Be careful what you wish for.

Stock market investors relished the opportunity to buy a second memory-chip giant, piling into SK Hynix on its U.S. debut at the end of last week. But the shares come with plenty of baggage—namely volatility in the Korean market. A 15% drop in its domestic stock Monday sets up a volatile start to the U.S. trading week.

It’s not the only thing unnerving markets. Oil prices jumped again, nearing $80 a barrel, as the U.S. and Iran traded more strikes over the weekend. 

If that doesn’t immediately bring inflation fears back in focus, then Tuesday’s consumer price index may do the trick. Failing that, Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh will testify before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Inflation will be in the spotlight again when some of the largest U.S. banks report earnings Tuesday—this time through the prism of consumer resilience.

But earnings season, which starts in earnest this week, can also be the catalyst the stock market needs to keep rallying. That’s if Corporate America can clear a high bar that keeps moving higher that’s getting increasingly loftier.

The S&P 500 is likely to report earnings growth above 29% in the second quarter, according to FactSet estimates—that would be the highest level since the final quarter of 2021. Earnings need to live up to the hype as the S&P 500 has jumped 4% over the past month and sits just 0.5% off its record high.

It’s a similar set-up for bank stocks. The State Street Financial Select Sector exchange-traded fund has jumped 4% in July and starts the week just 1.5% off a record. Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase stocks are also within 2% of their all-time highs.

If investors have one wish this week, it should be for a bumper start to earnings season.

—Callum Keown

Barron’s Live: As investors have piled into the AI trade, shares of many high-performing companies have been left in the bargain bin. That’s where most members of the Barron’s Roundtable tend to shop, including Christopher Rossbach, a managing partner and chief investment officer of J. Stern. Join Barron’s Senior Managing Editor Lauren R. Rublin and Senior Writer Teresa Rivas today at noon when they speak with Chris about the economic and market outlook, consumer spending, infrastructure investing, and his favorite stocks. Sign up here.

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The coming batch of earnings from America’s largest banks is set to reflect that Wall Street’s core businesses are doing exceptionally well, driven by a Main Street that’s doing well enough. The reports will also measure consumer resilience in the face of persistent inflation.

• Strong equities-trading and investment-banking activity this spring should propel earnings at Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Goldman, which all report on Tuesday. Morgan Stanley and others report in the days after.

• Big market swings in the second quarter and still-robust capital markets activity have meant a fruitful period for trading desks and advisory teams. JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon called the atmosphere “gung ho” in comments in late May. “There’s a lot of exuberance out there.”

• Measures of consumer health are stable: delinquencies and charge-off rates are holding steady across big lenders, and bank executives have marveled at how consumers are holding up. Wall Street is looking for signs of any weakness since the Iran war sent fuel prices higher.

• Even with booming Wall Street activities such as IPOs, mergers, and trading, Evercore ISI analyst Glenn Schorr sees room to run in the capital markets cycle. For investors, expectations of a strong second quarter could lead to a sell-the-news situation, he said.

What’s Next: JPMorgan shareholders are set to parse Dimon’s comments about recent leadership changes and his eventual succession plans after consumer banking chief Marianne Lake, once seen as a contender, announced plans to retire.

—Rebecca Ungarino

Investors just can’t make their minds up about how long the artificial-intelligence boom will last, and SK Hynix stock is getting caught in the crossfire. The memory-chip maker’s South Korean shares plummeted on Monday, just days after it enjoyed a stellar U.S. trading debut.

• The Busan-listed stock plunged 15% in Asian trading, dragging the flagship KOSPI Composite index down 9%. It was the stock’s largest percentage drop on record, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

• Investors may have been taking some profit following a 500% gain over the past 12 months. South Korean trading tends to be volatile, with increasing use of aggressive tools such as leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

• SK Hynix’s American depositary receipts had soared 13% to $168.49 on Friday when SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion in its U.S. trading debut, marking the largest share sale ever by a foreign company.

• Barron’s has argued that the ADRs offer a cheaper way to play the memory-chip boom than shares of American rival Micron Technology. SK Hynix trades at a lower valuation than Micron, despite its larger business, and has close ties to major customer Nvidia.

What’s Next: U.S. investors will soon be able to trade more than just SK Hynix ADRs. GraniteShares, Leverage Shares, ProShares, Direxion and Corgi Funds are all set to launch ETFs offering leveraged exposure to the memory-chip maker this week. 

—Adam Clark, George Glover, and Paul R. La Monica

Consumers haven’t seen the last of tariff-induced inflation, according to recently released research by the New York Fed. Even so, tariffs are no longer a sizable threat to prices, and their impact will diminish in coming months.

• About 47% of services companies and 44% of manufacturers said they plan to pass along additional price increases resulting from already-paid tariffs, Fed researchers reported, based on findings from the New York Fed’s regional business surveys.

• A majority of businesses surveyed said these price increases likely would hit in the next six months. Some 16% of service-related companies and 7% of manufacturers said they expected to still be implementing tariff-related price hikes in 2027.

• Higher tariffs have lifted goods prices, particularly in industries that rely on imports. The St. Louis Fed says tariffs accounted for roughly 0.5 percentage points of headline inflation and around 0.4 percentage points of core inflation from June to August 2025, reflected in the personal consumption expenditures price index.

• Tariff-related price hikes are likely to be incremental and concentrated in sectors that make up a relatively narrow portion of the inflation basket. Companies have already absorbed the majority of tariff costs, and levies are expected to trend lower since the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s global tariffs.

What’s Next: The effective tariff rate currently stands at an estimated 11.8%, according to The Budget Lab at Yale University. Once current temporary tariffs, valid for 150 days, expire later this month, and pharmaceutical tariffs start to take effect on July 31, the rate is expected to drop to 9.7%.

—Megan Leonhardt

This week, another data-center company is looking to test investors’ appetite for all things artificial intelligence. The company, Csquare, could get caught in the middle of two negative narratives: investors’ growing concerns about valuations for AI stocks and worries about IPO demand.

• Csquare operates 64 data centers. Its IPO stock is expected to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol CQSR. While it’s in a quiet period before the IPO, Csquare noted in a blog post in early June that AI should fuel demand growth.

• Csquare’s data centers are mostly in the U.S. but also in Montreal and London. It’s backed by real estate and investing giant Brookfield, which will have a 67% ownership stake after the IPO. The company is looking to raise up to $1.35 billion and have a market value of $4.2 billion.

• Skepticism over AI stocks is growing despite heavy spending on the technology. Memory chip leaders Micron and South Korea’s SK Hynix, which debuted in the U.S. on Friday, have been volatile stocks in the past few weeks. Shares of hyperscalers Microsoft and Meta Platforms are both down this year.

• Recent IPOs have struggled after big debuts, including SpaceX, which has pulled back 35%. AI chip company Cerebras Systems and geothermal energy company Fervo are also sharply lower than their IPO peaks. Data center company Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust has also been a lackluster performer. 

What’s Next: Like many start-ups, Csquare isn’t profitable. Its revenue grew 16% in the first quarter of 2026 to $270.5 million. But net losses rose from $34.9 million a year ago to $66 million in the first three months of this year.

—Paul R. La Monica

Walt Disney’s latest movie, the live-action remake of its popular animated Moana, fell far below expectations in its opening weekend, failing to even meet the debut performance of the original from a decade ago. For Hollywood, however, the summer is shaping up to be the biggest at the box office since 2019.

• The latest Moana, starring Australian actress Catherine Laga’aia and Dwayne Johnson as the demigod Maui, was a nearly shot-for-shot remake of Disney’s 2016 animated hit. Costing about $250 million to produce, its weekend domestic sales were $43 million, versus estimates for $52 million.

• The biggest factor for Moana was competition with other PG-rated films also in theaters, such as Universal’s Minions & Monsters and Disney Pixar’s Toy Story 5, Rentrak’s Paul Dergarabedian told Barron’s. Minions & Monsters and Toy Story 5 were the weekend’s second- and third-biggest films.

• Hollywood is enjoying an extraordinarily strong run, with an estimated $5.15 billion in box office revenue this year through July 12, up 10.6% from the same point in 2025. Summer box office since May 1 is up 6.8% from the same point last year.

• Ticket sales this weekend were actually down 38% from the same weekend last year, but Dergarabedian called it the “calm before the storm.” Christopher Nolan’s anticipated blockbuster The Odyssey by Comcast’s Universal Studios debuts Friday, and it has already presold the most IMAX tickets ever.

What’s Next: Roth senior research analyst Eric Handler expects Hollywood’s third-quarter box office revenue to be up 17% from 2025, writing that Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man: Brand New Day, opening July 31, could gross more than $700 million, and The Odyssey could sell more than $400 million.

—Janet H. Cho