U.S. Spring Home Selling Season Is Off to a Rough Start

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0:23The U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz goes into effect, sending global oil markets spinning once again. Plus, the spring home selling season is off to a rough start. Given that the March numbers weren't very good, it's really not a good sign for what we can expect in April and even into May. So this is a pretty bad sign for the rest of the year because spring is such an important time in the housing market. And Goldman reports a record quarter in banking and trading, but investors are worried about the future. It's Monday, April 13th. I'm Alex Osale for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today.

1:08As we mentioned on this morning's show, President Trump said the U.S. would blockade the Strait of Hormuz after diplomatic talks with Iran fell apart over the weekend. Well, this U.S. effort to stop traffic getting to and from Iranian ports is now in effect as of this morning, as the president told reporters at the White House today. Has the blockade started, sir? Yeah, it started at 10 o 'clock. WSJ senior video and national security correspondent Shelby Holliday is here to tell us how the U.S. is enforcing the blockade. Okay, Shelby, how does this blockade actually work? The idea, according to a release by U.S.

1:43Central Command, is that the U.S. is going to stop any ships that are going to or from Iranian ports. So this is not necessarily about the Strait of Hormuz. This is about causing economic pain to Iran and preventing Iran from trading with the rest of the world on the water. The U.S. has more than 15 warships in the region to support this blockade, which is a huge naval presence. And it gives a lot of options in terms of going after ships that try to enter or leave Iranian ports. You have an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln. That has a huge flight deck, so it could very easily be used as a base of operations if the U.S.

2:18is planning to board oil tankers, for example. And then you also have guided missile destroyers. Those can also support boarding operations. They have a small flight deck, but they can also be used to influence the movement of commercial ships and marshal them into certain areas. So the idea would be to create like a quarantine box and then escort those commercial ships that are violating the blockade into a specific region. How does the administration expect Iran to respond to this? Like, why are they putting this into place now? The U.S. is using this as leverage after talks fell apart in Pakistan.

2:53And the hope is that this creates economic pressure and we could potentially see another round of talks in the next few days if this brings Iran to the negotiating table. We've been hearing so much about this trait because of its importance to the global oil market. Does the U.S. blockade mean non-Iranian oil can actually move through then? The U.S. would love for non-Iranian oil to move through this trait. Right now, that's very difficult because Iran has said that it mined the strait. And so a lot of the experts and former Navy officials I've been talking to say this blockade does two things.

3:24It causes economic pain for Iran, but it also gives the U.S. some space to try to clear the mines that Iran has supposedly laid. Does this blockade come with risks to the U.S.? There's always a risk that Iran could try to fire drones or missiles at U.S. ships or even at oil tankers. And any Iranian threat freezes traffic. So the U.S. wants ships to start moving through the Strait of Hormuz again and to get all that oil out of the Gulf. So any sort of Iranian retaliation further paralyzes that traffic. And there's also the risk that Iran tries to attack the ports of its neighboring countries. It's already threatened to do so.

4:00There are definitely concerns that the U.S. would have to police the waterway indefinitely. There's no timeline attached to this. Right. In fact, a reporter asked President Trump about this today. Mr. President, as far as the naval blockade is concerned, what's the endgame? Is it to force Iran back to the negotiating table? Is it to open up the straits so the gas prices ultimately come down? Maybe everything. I mean, both of those things, certainly, and more. We can't let a country blackmail or extort the world because that's what they're doing. The ultimate goal is to get Iran back to the negotiating table and to agree to the certain demands that the U.S.

4:38has, right? No nuclear enrichment, no nuclear weapons, no support for proxies. It's just probably unlikely that Iran would sit down and say yes to everything the U.S. is demanding. That was WSJ senior video and national security correspondent Shelby Holliday. Thanks so much, Shelby. Thank you. Meanwhile, oil prices are climbing again in response to the U.S. blockade. Brent crude futures, the international oil benchmark, hovered around$100 a barrel today. WSJ reporter Joe Wallace says the effect of the blockade will ripple around the world. One might now expect 2 million barrels a day of Iranian oil exports to be taken off the market.

5:15Almost all of that oil goes to China, but it's such a large amount of oil that in a global market, the effects would be felt internationally. China, you would expect, would then join an already heated competition for scarce supplies from the US and Europe to replace at least some of those Iranian barrels, which could drive prices even higher. The other possibility is that Iran could seek to retaliate, for example, by encouraging its allies in Yemen, the Houthi rebels, to make it more difficult for Saudi Arabia to export oil from the Red Sea on Saudi Arabia's western coast. Oil producers in the Gulf are preparing for more short-term pain.

5:52OPEC said today that its crude oil production fell by more than 7 million barrels a day in March, to about 21 million barrels a day. Joe says no matter how much longer the conflict lasts, the global oil market will likely be feeling the disruption for a while. Even if the Strait of Hormuz were magically to reopen tomorrow, it'd be a logistical nightmare to get all the ships back in the right place and get the oil flowing at pre-war rates, let alone restarting all the production that's come offline. If you look at the widely followed futures, however, there does still seem to be an expectation that this will all be over in a kind of rolling two-week window, almost matching the president's own rolling two-week windows.

6:30So energy traders on Wall Street still seem to think this might wrap up sooner. Major U.S. indexes ended the day higher as investors cling to hope that the U.S. and Iran will come back to the negotiating table. The Nasdaq led the gains, closing up 1.2 percent.

6:48In Washington, the House Ethics Committee said today that it's investigating the allegations against California Representative Eric Swalwell, and several lawmakers are pushing to expel him. The San Francisco Chronicle and CNN have published accounts of women who accused Swalwell of sexual misconduct. One unnamed former Swalwell staff member said she was sexually assaulted when she was too drunk to consent. Swalwell has denied the rape allegations. The California Democrat this weekend suspended his campaign for governor of the state. Coming up, what happens when the demand for AI computing power outpaces its supply?

7:23That's after the break.

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8:02The crucial spring selling season is off to a rough start. The National Association of Realtors said today that existing home sales declined 3.6 percent in March, falling to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.98 million. That's the lowest level since June 2025 and far worse than economists expected. WSJ housing reporter Nicole Friedman joins me now. Nicole, people had high hopes coming into the spring. In February, home sales rose more than expected, and mortgage rates dipped down below 6 % for the first time in years. So what's gone wrong in March? It's surprising because the March home sales mostly reflect people who are actually out shopping in January and February.

8:45And so what this shows is that even when rates were falling, that just wasn't enough to actually jumpstart home sales activity. Buyers are kind of still just freaked out about the economy. They're nervous about the job market. Of course, March was the month that we saw the conflict in Iran take off. Is that playing a role here at all? Next month, when we see the April data, that's going to be a bigger indication of what the effect of the war in Iran has been on the housing market, because we really saw rates start to rise in March pretty quickly. So this is a pretty bad sign for the rest of the year, because spring is the busiest time for home purchases, home sales.

9:26And the National Association of Realtors had been very bullish coming into 2026 and had forecasted a 14 % increase in existing home sales this year, and now they're calling for just a 4 % increase. They're looking at what we saw in the first quarter of the year and saying this just isn't going to be the rebound year that they had hoped for. That was WSJ reporter Nicole Friedman. Thanks, Nicole. Thank you for having me. News Corp, owner of the journal, operates Realtor.com under license from the National Association of Realtors. You've heard the news about the numbers. Now we want to hear from you.

10:01Are worries about mortgage rates, inflation, or the economy affecting your home search, or not at all? And what are prices like where you live? Send a voice memo to wnpod at wsj.com or leave a voicemail with your name and location at 212-416-4328. We might use it on the show. And Goldman Sachs kick-started earning season today for the country's big banks. Goldman said its profit jumped 19 percent in the first quarter thanks to record banking and markets revenue. The war in Iran has some investors worried about what will happen on Wall Street. Goldman CEO David Solomon said today he expects companies will still push ahead with their deal plans that lead to big fees for bankers.

10:43And so we continue to see significant activity on the M &A front. And I don't see, unless the overall environment got much, much worse, I don't see that slowing based on what we see at the moment. That said, there is no question that with the conflict in the Middle East, IPO activity slowed a little bit, particularly in March. Goldman stock closed down almost 2 percent.

11:11In tech news, for the first time, Meta is expected to surpass Alphabet's Google to become the world's leading digital advertising business. That's according to estimates from research firm eMarketer. Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, is getting a lift from newer products like Reels, which are short videos. Meta and Google decline to comment. And the artificial intelligence gold rush is drying up the supply of the one resource that AI developers can't do without, computing power. WSJ tech reporter Robbie Whelan told our tech news briefing podcast that that's causing headaches for people who rely on AI products.

11:47Some of these companies, for example, Anthropic and OpenAI just simply don't have enough compute to serve everyone who wants to use their products. And so they have to prioritize certain users ahead of others. And what that generally means in practice is asking them to pay more. We spoke to a gentleman who is a founder of a company that uses coding all the time. He loves using Anthropic's Opus 4.6 tool to create agents that he needs for his business. But because there have been so many stoppages, outages on Anthropic because of the lack of computing power that we're seeing in the market right now, He's had to shift to other models.

12:20He's using open AI a lot more than he used to because his preferred tool from Anthropic is really suffering from this supply crunch that we're seeing. Another consequence is just that maybe the revolution that AI is supposedly going to cause is going to proceed a little bit more slowly than we had initially thought until we can allow the infrastructure piece of it to catch up to the demand piece. The head of Anthropics, Claude Code, said they're working hard to meet the increase in demand. And to hear more from Robbie, listen to tomorrow's episode of Tech News Briefing.

12:56And that's what's news for this Monday afternoon. Today's show is produced by Danny Lewis with supervising producer Tali Arbel. I'm Alex Osala for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.

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