A softer-than-expected U.S. jobs report on Friday rounded out a week in which equities recouped the last of their March losses, Brent crude settled near $92 a barrel and traders began openly debating whether the Federal Reserve would cut rates in June rather than wait until July, leaving Wall Street to close the first full month after the Iran ceasefire with a clear shift in tone.

Nonfarm payrolls expanded by 142,000 in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, below the 178,000 consensus compiled by Bloomberg and a slowdown from the revised 197,000 March figure. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.1 percent from 4.0 percent, and average hourly earnings rose 0.2 percent on the month, taking the annual pace to 3.7 percent. Revisions to the prior two months trimmed a combined 41,000 from previously reported gains.

The S&P 500 closed Friday at 5,704, up 0.6 percent on the day and 1.6 percent on the week, putting the index 0.5 percent above its Feb. 19 peak and effectively erasing the drawdown that took hold when Iranian missiles began landing in Israel in early March. The Nasdaq Composite gained 1.1 percent on Friday to 18,612, helped by a 4.7 percent jump in Nvidia after Thursday night’s earnings. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.3 percent.

“This is the kind of print the doves at the Fed have been waiting for since the war began,” said John Reilly, an energy and macro analyst at Citi. “You have wage growth softening, the unemployment rate creeping higher, and a labor market that finally looks like it is rebalancing rather than overheating. Combine that with Brent below $95 and a core PCE that came in benign yesterday, and the case for waiting until July to cut is genuinely harder to make than it was two weeks ago.”

Fed funds futures repriced sharply after the 8:30 a.m. release. The implied probability of a 25-basis-point cut at the June 16-17 meeting jumped to 78 percent from 64 percent the previous evening, according to CME data, while a July cut is now priced at near certainty. The two-year Treasury yield fell nine basis points to 3.74 percent, its lowest closing level of the year. The 10-year ended at 4.04 percent, down five basis points on the day and 14 basis points on the week.

Crude continued its post-war descent. Brent for July delivery, which became the front-month contract Friday, settled at $92.10 a barrel in London, down 0.8 percent on the day. West Texas Intermediate finished at $87.85. Both benchmarks have now retraced nearly the entire war premium that built up after the conflict began in early March and are trading at levels first reached during the soft-demand stretch of last September.

The proximate driver remained supply. The International Energy Agency, in a monthly oil market report released Tuesday, raised its 2026 non-OPEC supply forecast by 380,000 barrels a day to reflect both the OPEC+ April 1 production hike, faster-than-expected Libyan restarts and the resumption of pre-war Iranian export volumes through Kharg Island. The agency trimmed its global demand growth forecast to 920,000 barrels a day, citing softer Chinese diesel consumption and a slower-than-anticipated rebound in jet fuel.

“Every supply story we got this week pointed the same direction, and demand simply has not caught up,” said Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, in a note to clients Friday afternoon. “The Saudis can defend $90, and probably will, but it will require a coordinated rollback that the political optics inside OPEC+ make difficult right now. We expect the June 4 Vienna meeting to feature a lot more debate than the market is currently pricing.”

The week’s central event for equities was the megacap earnings cluster. Microsoft on Tuesday posted Azure revenue growth of 32 percent year over year, raised its fiscal 2026 capital expenditure guidance by $14 billion to $122 billion, and saw its shares finish the week up 3.4 percent. Apple delivered a beat on services revenue Wednesday despite a 6 percent drop in greater China iPhone unit sales, and added 2.2 percent on the week. Nvidia, reporting Thursday after the bell, guided current-quarter revenue to $48 billion at the midpoint, roughly $4 billion above consensus, and disclosed that its data center order backlog had grown to $187 billion. The stock closed Friday at $1,142, an all-time high.

“The hyperscaler capex cycle just got a green light from every direction at once,” said Stacy Rasgon, a senior semiconductor analyst at Bernstein, on a Friday morning client call. “The federal AI moratorium is dead, the state bills are not going to move before next year’s legislative sessions, and the cloud quarter numbers are validating the spend. Whatever skeptics were left in the fund manager survey are now capitulating.”

Of the 312 S&P 500 companies that have reported through Friday, 78 percent have beaten consensus earnings estimates, according to FactSet, and the blended first-quarter earnings growth rate now stands at 8.1 percent, up from the 5.4 percent projected at the end of March. Energy and materials remain the only two sectors with negative blended growth.

European equities also closed the week firmly. The Stoxx 600 rose 0.9 percent on Friday and 2.1 percent on the week, helped by strong results from HSBC, BP and Mercedes-Benz. Eurozone flash CPI for April, released Thursday, printed at 2.3 percent year over year, the slowest pace since November and below consensus, raising expectations of a June 5 European Central Bank rate cut. The Nikkei 225 in Tokyo gained 1.4 percent on the week to 40,228, while mainland Chinese stocks were closed Friday for the Labor Day holiday.

The dollar resumed its decline on the payrolls miss. The DXY index fell 0.6 percent Friday and 1.2 percent on the week, with the euro touching $1.114 and the yen strengthening to 146.80. Gold rebounded 1.1 percent Friday to $2,221 an ounce as Treasury yields fell.

Looking ahead, the calendar slows. The most-watched data of the coming week will be the April consumer price report due Wednesday and Friday’s preliminary University of Michigan sentiment survey. OPEC+ ministers remain scheduled to convene in Vienna on June 4, with several delegations privately signaling that the agenda will include a review of the April production hike’s pace. Analysts at Goldman Sachs said in a Friday note that the bank would publish revised year-end equity and oil targets the following week to reflect what its strategists described as “a materially different end to the second quarter than we forecast in March.”