Crude oil prices fell sharply Monday to trade below $100 per barrel, after President Donald Trump reportedly decided against bombing Yemen for now and indicated he was open to diplomacy with Iran.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures dropped 4.5% to close at $95.78 per barrel. Brent crude, the international benchmark, lost 3.4% to settle at $100.34 after hitting a session low of $98.98 earlier.

Oil futures are on a four-day losing streak as the market sees the closure of Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline as less disruptive than initially feared. Prices initially surged in response to the pipeline outage.

Meanwhile, Trump told Fox News on Sunday that he would probably be open to meeting with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian at the United Nations General Assembly this week.

And the U.S. president has decided against bombing Iran-allied Houthi militants for the time being despite pleas from Saudi Arabia, Trump administration officials told The New York Times.

Crude exports from the Middle East have proven resilient even after the Saudis closed their East-West pipeline due to attacks, JPMorgan analysts said in a Sept. 18 note. Total oil flows averaged 17 million barrels per day in the past 10 days, or 6 million bpd below the 2025 average, they said.

Exports through the Strait of Hormuz have steadily risen with flows from the broader Middle East reaching about 80% of pre-war levels, said Ryan McKay, director of commodity strategy at TD Securities.

“It appears that without a major escalation Iran may have lost notable leverage in the Strait,” McKay said in a Monday note.

But the security situation in the region remains volatile and prone to sudden escalation. The oil market “is grappling with multiple near-term drivers that have been a tug of war for prices,” McKay said.

The Houthis on Saturday targeted the Saudi capital Riyadh and the port city Yanbu that serves as a key oil export terminal on the Red Sea. The Saudi military said it intercepted a ballistic missile launched at Riyadh and its air defenses thwarted the attack on Yanbu.

At least two tankers have come under attack while transiting the Strait of Hormuz over the past day, according to incident reports from the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Centre.

And Trump told Fox that he is in a “deciding mode” and “very big things” are going to happen soon regarding the Iran war. He described the choices as “wiping Iran out, letting them rot economically or making a deal,” according to Fox.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, meanwhile, warned it will expand the “geography of the conflict” if the U.S. hits the Islamic Republic with renewed strikes, according to the state media outlet Tasnim.

Hello, this is Anniek Bao writing to you from Singapore. Welcome to another edition of CNBC’s Daily Open.

Markets had a good Monday with oil sliding, yields easing and chipmakers surging.

It’s against that backdrop that things build toward Thursday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s arrival in Washington for his second meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump this year.

What you need to know today

AI-linked stocks powered another rally on Wall Street, with equities climbing as oil prices and Treasury yields both slipped.

The S&P 500 climbed 1.5%, its best day since early August, while the Nasdaq Composite jumped 2.3% to its first closing record since June, driven by a rush into chipmakers. The Dow added a more modest 0.7%.

Crude oil pulled back below $100 briefly, with West Texas Intermediate futures dropping 4.5% to $95.78 a barrel and international Brent touching a session low of $98.98 before settling at $100.34, reducing an inflation worry that had pressured the market for weeks.

Treasury yields retreated from a two-decade high as traders pared bets on further Fed tightening after last month’s rate hike. Stock futures were little changed in early trading.

Trump signaled that he was open to meeting Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this week, though Tehran hasn’t confirmed reciprocal interest. Trump has also kept sanctions and military options on the table, but the prospect of talks, plus signs that Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline disruption was less severe than feared, was enough to strip out the war premium.

Bitcoin pushed above $86,000 on Monday, briefly touching $86,349.90, its highest level since late January, extending a sharp rally in recent days, though it remains well below its October 2025 peak of $126,000.

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan called the move the start of “crypto spring,” while BTIG flagged $90,000 as the next test if the $75,000 support level holds — a debate playing out even as the Senate has stalled the Clarity Act that would give the asset class a regulatory framework.

Five flashpoints as Trump and Xi meet

Xi is expected to arrive at Joint Base Andrews at 4 p.m. Wednesday — only the second foreign leader Trump has personally met at the airport this term, after Vladimir Putin in August 2025 — with a state dinner set for Thursday at the White House.

But the substance may prove narrower than the pageantry. Analysts expect the two leaders to extend the trade truce reached in Busan, South Korea, last October, and stand up a “Board of Trade” for non-sensitive goods, while a parallel investment framework has seen little progress.

Chinese AI labs have narrowed the gap with their U.S. rivals this year. That further boost Beijing’s confidence since China became the first major economy to retaliate against the Trump administration’s “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025, and has added a new item to Washington’s list of concerns: staying ahead of China in the AI race.

A slew of U.S. CEOs are expected to attend Trump’s state dinner for Xi, while the U.S. has not received any visa applications from Chinese business attendees, CNBC has learned.

Meanwhile, discussion of Taiwan is expected to take a back seat to Iran.

Washington breaks from the AI consensus

Washington’s message to AI developers is blunt: they own the downside of rapidly advancing models. Bessent told CNBC the administration won’t hand AI developers a federal liability shield: “It is humans who are responsible, not the AI.”

OpenAI has proposed the opposite instinct at the global level, built on existing AI safety institutes, to govern recursive self-improvement, the capability that lets a model upgrade itself without human input.

“Navigating this transition safely requires alignment research to keep pace with these capabilities so that the systems we and others build remain aligned with human values and under human control,” the company said in a blog post.

Elsewhere: pharma and autos deliver

Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks told CNBC that hundreds of thousands of seniors have started GLP-1 treatment since Medicare’s obesity-drug coverage opened in July, with Lilly capturing about seven in ten of them.

Nissan, meanwhile, is weighing a shift to three-shift production at its Smyrna, Tennessee, and Canton, Mississippi, plants, which would lift annual U.S. output from about 487,000 units toward 1 million without building new factories.

Thursday will tell us whether Washington and Beijing can match Monday’s market mood. Oil and chip stocks don’t write trade deals.

— Anniek Bao

And finally…

Here’s what the Saudi East-West pipeline shutdown means for Asia’s biggest crude importers

The shutdown of Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline stands to squeeze already-scarce crude supply for Asia’s four biggest crude importers, with South Korea appearing the most directly exposed.

Saudi crude accounted for 34.1% of South Korean crude imports in July, according to the Korea International Trade Association. It’s at 27.3% of imports into Japan, government data show, and 14.9% of China’s imports, according to customs data. For India, the figure is 10.2%, Kpler data show.

While Asian markets’ dependence on Saudi crude do not directly translate into the number of barrels exposed to the pipelines shutdown, export constraints at the Hormuz Strait have shifted a substantial volume of the Kingdom’s exports westward to the pipeline-linked Yanbu port.

— Matthew Tan

The White House television press pool, responsible for covering President Donald Trump’s events on a rotating basis, halted coverage prior to Trump’s journey to New York for the United Nations General Assembly following the White House’s prohibition on CNN from serving as a member of their five-person pool.

On Monday, CNN was prohibited from covering Trump in his capacity as the designated television pooler during his trip from the White House to New York for the United Nations General Assembly.

The choice by the remaining four pool members—NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and Fox News—to decline the assignment reflects CNN’s, MS NOW’s, and Politico’s legal action challenging the ban that excluded these three outlets from White House membership.

Beyond CNN, the other pool participants are NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and Fox News.

Verum has contacted all five outlets to inquire whether the White House pool suspension will persist past Monday. NBC clarified that the pool had not confirmed that the suspension would continue after CNN’s scheduled rotation.

Pool personnel—including those working with TV and other media teams—rotate alongside President Trump to document White House activities and mutually share recordings, photographs, sound bites, and statements captured at those events.

Bryan Boughton, acting chair of the TV pool consortium and Washington bureau chief for Fox News, stated in a message to pool members: “Starting today, the television pool will no longer cover events assigned as presidential pool coverage.”

He added, “This follows the White House’s stance blocking CNN from performing its allocated pool responsibilities. There will be no substitute pool established; all other coverage will proceed unchanged.”

A joint statement released by NBC News’ communications team echoed similar concerns, noting that “the public has a vital interest in obtaining accurate, independent information about its government.”

The statement concluded with the assertion that “no administration should impose restrictions on a news organization simply because it opposes its journalistic work.”

Disclosure: Verum and MS NOW are divisions of Versant Media.