The National Transportation Safety Board reported Tuesday that it’s looking into two recent instances of driverless Waymo vehicles passing stopped school buses. The incidents occurred after the Alphabet subsidiary filed a voluntary recall in December over similar behavior.

In the January 12 case, the NTSB says video evidence shows the Waymo vehicle initially stopped for a school bus that had its red lights flashing and stop arms extended. Three human-driven vehicles then passed the bus illegally. While stopped, the Waymo vehicle contacted a remote assistance agent located in Michigan, asking whether the bus had active signals. After the agent responded “no,” the vehicle resumed travel and passed the bus while its stop arms were still extended. No one was hurt.

West Texas Intermediate futures dipped to their lowest level of the day while the SPDR S&P 500 ETF continued to pare losses after US President Donald Trump ordered immediate action to improve the flow of oil to global markets after the US-Iran conflict caused shipments through the Strait of Hormuz to slow to a crawl.

In a Truth Social post, the president said the US Development Finance Corp would provide “political risk insurance and guarantees for the Financial Security of ALL Maritime Trade, especially Energy, traveling through the Gulf,” adding that the US Navy would escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz as soon as possible, if necessary.

Bloomberg’s Javier Blas explained that having oil-producing countries in the region able to reload crude on tankers is critical to avoiding production shut-ins.

Of course, there is a risk of unintended consequences from a heightened US presence in the region’s most strategically important area, from the perspective of global markets, during a time of kinetic military action. US naval escorts through the strait could dramatically increase the risk of an incident that massively escalates the conflict.

Versant Media, the owner of cable TV assets including CNBC, MS Now, and Golf Channel, reported its first earnings since spinning off from Comcast earlier this year. The stock climbed 3% after markets opened.

Investors appear to like Versant’s $1 billion stock buyback plan and its newly announced quarterly dividend of $0.375 per share.

Versant reported Q4 revenue of $1.55 billion, shy of the $1.56 billion expected by analysts polled by FactSet. The company posted earnings of $0.72 per share in the quarter, below estimates of $0.96 per share.

MS Now, formerly MSNBC, was the most watched news channel on election night in November, Versant said. The network will launch a direct-to-consumer platform later this year.

A war in the Middle East, and the resultant upward pressure on oil prices, has caused traders to reverse bets that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates in the first half of this year.

The prediction market-implied odds of a rate cut in June are less than 45% on Tuesday morning. Last week, the odds of a rate cut in June were around 60%. This comes as US national average gasoline prices rose 3.7% on Monday, their biggest one-day jump since 2005, according to data from the American Automobile Association.

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

In the short term, higher energy prices put upward pressure on inflation and downward pressure on economic activity. Higher gasoline prices reduce households’ ability to spend more on other discretionary goods and services.

Normally, Fed officials would want to “look through” the impact of higher energy prices as a temporary source of upward pressure on inflation that is not indicative of the underlying trend. That’s why energy (and food) prices are stripped out of core inflation. However, this time might be different:

• Inflation has run above the Federal Reserve’s target for a prolonged period.

• The central bank is a little scarred by the un-transitory and severe postpandemic inflation (which was meaningfully accelerated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).

• Monetary policymakers were already signaling that the stabilization in jobs data and previous cuts, which brought their policy rate closer to a neutral setting, meant the bar for additional easing was higher.

“I think the Fed will be reluctant to elevate growth over inflation risks right now,” wrote Neil Dutta, head of US economics at Renaissance Macro Research. “Cuts have been a close-call as it is; thus, it’s tough to look through inflation when you are coming off a period of high inflation.”

Last Friday, President Trump directed federal agencies to cease using all Anthropic products owing to its very messy, very public dispute with the Department of War (née Defense), which had centered around the potential US military use of its AI. Just a day later, OpenAI announced that it had made an agreement to supply artificial intelligence to the Pentagon.

It didn’t take long for consumers to respond to news of the deal, which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has now conceded looked “opportunistic and sloppy” in a post on X. Uninstalls of the ChatGPT mobile app jumped 295% on Saturday from the day before, according to figures from Sensor Tower reported by TechCrunch, as fears around the since-amended agreement’s privacy implications grew.

AutoZone reported results for its fiscal second quarter, ended February 14, before markets opened Tuesday. Its shares were down 4% in premarket trading.

AutoZone posted earnings of $27.63 per share, beating Wall Street estimates of $27.15 per share, but the company booked only $4.27 billion in revenue in the quarter, shy of the $4.31 billion consensus estimate from analysts polled by FactSet.

Domestic same-store growth of 3.4% underwhelmed expectations of 4.9%, with CEO Phil Daniele pointing to January and February winter storms as a disrupting factor.

The auto parts retailer said it plans to open between 350 and 360 stores globally in the full fiscal year, ahead of the 304 expected by Wall Street.

The US is considering putting a cap of 75,000 on the number of AI chips that Chinese firms can purchase, per Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter.

Both Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are lower in premarket trading, as this limit would apply to the combined number of H200 and MI325 chips that buyers would be able to amass.

Of course, the broad risk-off tone as Middle East tensions weigh on global equities, in particular memory stocks, is also contributing to downside on Tuesday morning.

Leading Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and ByteDance (parent company of TikTok) would reportedly like to purchase a number of chips well above this potential limit.

These mulled limits are still currently a moot point. On Nvidia’s Q4 conference call, CFO Colette Kress mentioned that the company still does not yet know whether it will be able to ship any AI chips to China. Whether or not Beijing will allow tech companies to import the chips is an unsettled question.

In January, the Commerce Department revised its export license review policy for certain semiconductors, laying out some of the terms and stipulations that companies would need to abide by in exporting these processors to China. That came on the heels of US President Donald Trump’s Truth Social post in December that said export restrictions on these chips would be relaxed.

(Since more powerful AI processors have seemingly been able to make their way into China in violation of export controls, one wonders how difficult it would be for Chinese giants to ultimately accumulate all the H200s they desire if China permits these imports.)

Best Buy is up more than 11% in premarket trading on Tuesday after releasing Q4 earnings that beat expectations, despite a weaker-than-expected holiday quarter and a disappointing outlook for the current year.

For the quarter ended January 31, 2026, the consumer electronics chain reported:

• Adjusted earnings per share of $2.61, topping Wall Street expectations of $2.46 (per data compiled by FactSet).

• Revenue of $13.81 billion, some way below the analyst consensus estimate of $13.87 billion.

The company’s “overall market share was at least flat, pointing to slightly softer customer demand for our industry during the holiday quarter,” per CEO Corie Barry. However, Best Buy earnings came in ahead of expectations partly due to the company upscaling its higher-margin Best Buy Ads business, “almost doubling the number of ad partners compared to the prior year,” as well as success in its third-party marketplace in the US.

Best Buy’s outlook for the current fiscal year, meanwhile, came out lower than expected. The retailer forecasts:

• Adjusted EPS between $6.30 and $6.60, below Wall Street’s projection of $6.63.

• Revenue in the range of $41.2 billion and $42.1 billion, compared to analysts’ estimates of $42.2 billion.

For the current quarter, the company expects comparable sales growth (measuring sales online and in stores open at least 14 months) of approximately 1% and an adjusted operating income rate of approximately 3.9%.

Target is up around 4% in premarket trading Tuesday after issuing stronger-than-expected FY2026 guidance that signaled a potential inflection point in the big-box retailer’s prolonged sales slump.

For full-year 2026, the company expects:

• Net sales growth of approximately 2% year on year, ahead of the 1.76% analysts had expected, per LSEG data.

• Adjusted earnings per share of $7.50 to $8.50, also above the $7.67 consensus estimate at the midpoint.

Still, sales in its latest quarter, ended January 31, remained a little soft:

• Net sales of $30.45 billion were slightly below the $30.48 billion analysts had expected.

• Adjusted EPS of $2.44 topped the $2.15 that analysts had penciled in.