The S&P 500 climbed above 7,800 for the first time intraday and closed at a record 7,798.99 even after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in Panama that the U.S. Navy could keep blocking Iranian ports "indefinitely" by rotating ships through the region. The Nasdaq Composite rose 0.81% to 26,803.03, index futures were little changed, and crude prices steadied in Asia after Brent settled at $87.07 a barrel, down more than 2%, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate fell to $81.25 overnight. In Europe, the U.K. economy grew 0.4% in the second quarter after 0.6% in the first, leaving it on course to be the G7's fastest-growing economy for a second straight quarter, though the IMF (International Monetary Fund) has warned the Iran war and higher energy costs could hit Britain especially hard. In Asia, South Korea's Kospi entered a technical bull market (a rise of 20% from a recent low) after rebounding more than 20% from its July 30 trough, highlighting how quickly leveraged selling in tech can reverse. AI news also shifted from model performance to money and management, with Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao holding early investor meetings ahead of a possible IPO, OpenAI losing chief revenue officer Denise Dresser days after Brad Lightcap said he would leave, and Mark Zuckerberg releasing Meta's strongest model as open source. Separate reporting highlighted SK Hynix's $720 billion memory-factory buildout in South Korea as the company, now valued at more than $1 trillion, bets that AI-driven demand and tight capacity will keep reshaping the chip cycle.