New York, Feb 22, 2026, 10:08 (EST) — The market is closed.
Amazon.com finished Friday up 2.6% at $210.11, rebounding after the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out President Donald Trump’s global tariffs put in place under emergency powers. “Today is a removal of some uncertainty, and we’re on to the next phase,” said Mike Dickson, head of research and quantitative strategies at Horizon Investments. (Reuters)
The calm vanished quickly. Within hours, Trump hit back, rolling out a blanket import tariff and launching new trade probes that set the stage for more possible duties. Less than a day later, he pushed the tariff up to 15%, the highest allowed under his chosen statute. “The uncertainty, in his view, just gives him enormous additional leverage,” said Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade official now at the Asia Society Policy Institute. (Reuters)
Rates keep shifting, and big tech moves right along with them. The Commerce Department’s favored inflation measure for the Fed — core PCE, without food and energy — climbed 0.4% in December, landing at 3.0% year over year. That’s quick enough to make a pre-June rate cut look unlikely. “This tends to be a very volatile category,” said Barclays economist Pooja Sriram, who flagged a spike in legal services as a factor. (Reuters)
The tariff decision on Friday boosted shares of various consumer companies linked to imports and discretionary buys. But Mark Malek of Siebert Financial flagged ongoing uncertainty despite the court’s move. “While tariffs may be lifted for now, the underlying motivations for them still exist,” he said. (Investopedia)
Amazon’s wrangling with tariffs comes as questions persist about its heavy investment pace. The company recently outlined plans for $200 billion in capital spending for 2026. CEO Andy Jassy, addressing comparisons with smaller cloud players, argued, “it’s very different having 24% year-over-year growth” on AWS’s much larger scale. “The market just dislikes the substantial amount of money that keeps getting put into capex for these growth rates,” said Dave Wagner, portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors. (Reuters)
Investors weighed new details about AWS reliability. In December, Amazon’s cloud unit experienced an outage affecting a cost-management feature, a spokesperson confirmed to Reuters. The Financial Times linked the incident to mistakes with Amazon’s own AI tools. The spokesperson described it as “an extremely limited event,” emphasizing it wasn’t an AWS-wide outage. (Reuters)
U.S. markets are closed Sunday, so traders will be eyeing the calendar for cues. Fed Governor Christopher Waller is set to deliver remarks both Monday and Tuesday. On Tuesday, February’s consumer confidence numbers land—the sort of data that tends to sway retail-exposed stocks, especially when tariffs and inflation share the spotlight. (Kiplinger)
The flip side isn’t hard to imagine. Should the new levy hold and import costs climb, sellers often try passing those higher costs onto buyers—which risks damping demand, or else they absorb the hit themselves and see margins shrink. And persistent inflation? That’s a quick way to sap the rate-cut optimism supporting the megacaps.
Amazon traders are eyeing Monday’s open for specifics on the rollout speed and mechanics of the new import tariff, along with any hints about additional duties stemming from the administration’s probes. The next key figure comes Friday: January’s Producer Price Index drops at 8:30 a.m. ET on Feb. 27, a wholesale inflation gauge with the power to shift market rate expectations. (Bls)
