Passenger planes sit on the tarmac at Dubai International Airport in Dubai on March 11, 2026. Drones fell near Dubai airport, injuring four people, while ships were hit in or near the Strait of Hormuz on March 11 as Iran kept up its campaign disrupting oil markets and air and maritime traffic.<\/p>\n
AFP | Getty Images<\/p>\n
Hello, this is Hui Jie writing to you from Singapore. Welcome to another edition of CNBC’s Daily Open.<\/p>\n
Oil markets had just begun to steady at higher levels \u2014 on the back of a fragile ceasefire. Then came another jolt: the United Arab Emirates is set to exit OPEC.<\/p>\n
At the same time, warnings about the global economy are growing louder. After billionaire Ray Dalio warned of a U.S. economy in stagflation, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is now sounding the alarm on a potential debt crisis.<\/p>\n
Yet markets did not sell off on oil or macro fears. Instead, a chip-related scare tied to AI demand rattled investors, a reminder of just how deeply embedded that narrative\u00a0is\u00a0in their psyche.<\/p>\n
What you need to know today<\/p>\n “The only thing predictable about life is its unpredictability.”<\/p>\n It is an unlikely line from an unlikely source: Remy, the animated rat-turned-cook in the Pixar movie Ratatouille. But it captures the wild happenings of the last 24 hours rather neatly.<\/p>\n Just as oil prices were beginning to find their footing with a tenuous U.S.-Iran ceasefire, the market was hit with the news of the United Arab Emirates’ exit from OPEC on May 1.<\/a> <\/p>\n The loss of one of its most influential members would likely lead<\/a> to greater volatility in oil prices. The UAE was one of the few producers, alongside Saudi Arabia, that had meaningful spare capacity to influence prices and respond to supply shocks.<\/p>\n Its exit could leave OPEC “structurally weaker” as a consequence, Jorge Le\u00f3n, head of geopolitical analysis at Rystad Energy, said.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, macroeconomic warnings are intensifying. A day after billionaire investor Ray Dalio raised the specter of a U.S. economy in stagflation, Jamie Dimon warned that rising government debt could trigger a bond market crisis<\/a>.<\/p>\n “The way it’s going now, there will be some kind of bond crisis, and then we’ll have to deal with it,” Dimon said.<\/p>\n “The level of things that are adding to the risk column are high, like geopolitics, oil, government deficits,” he added. “They may go away, but they may not, and we don’t know what confluence of events causes the problem.”<\/p>\n Given that backdrop, a risk-off move in markets might seem inevitable. It came, but not for those reasons.<\/p>\n Instead, stocks pulled back from their records<\/a> on a chip sell-off after a report in The Wall Street Journal said<\/a> OpenAI has fallen short of its own projections for user growth and revenue. <\/p>\n The miss has raised internal concerns about whether the company can sustain the massive financial commitments required to build out data centers and secure long-term computing capacity.<\/p>\n The reaction underscores a shift in market psychology: while geopolitics and macro risks loom large, it is the AI narrative that continues to drive sentiment \u2014 and volatility.<\/p>\n In other words, the rat was right: Predictably unpredictable!<\/p>\n \u2014 Lim Hui Jie<\/p>\n And finally…<\/p>\n \u2018Draconian development\u2019 in Meta-Manus deal draws the line in China\u2019s AI race with the U.S.<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0China’s decision\u00a0to block<\/a>\u00a0U.S. tech giant\u00a0Meta<\/a>‘s $2 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Manus is being seen by analysts as a warning to tech entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n “Clearly after Manusgate, founders will know that if you start in China, you stay in China,” said Duncan Clark, an early advisor to Alibaba and chairman of consultancy firm BDA China.<\/p>\n “We know the deal was already in trouble,” he said, “but this draconian development is on the more extreme side of the likely outcomes.”<\/p>\n \u2014 Evelyn Cheng<\/p>\n