This was the week the war in Iran almost ended. And then, almost as quickly, it very much didn't.

With just one hour to spare before an 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline—a deadline he had framed with the apocalyptic warning that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again"—President Donald Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran.

The reaction in the oil market was immediate and violent. Crude plunged 17% on Wednesday. That wasn't just a bad day; it was the biggest single-day drop since the chaos of April 2020. For the week, the commodity, as tracked by the United States Oil Fund (USO), finished at $96 a barrel, down a staggering 13.7%. It was the worst weekly decline in six years.

For a glorious, fleeting moment, it looked like the pump-price nightmare of the last six weeks might finally be lifting. Drivers could almost taste the relief. Then reality, in the form of geopolitics, barged back in.

Israeli strikes in Lebanon followed the ceasefire announcement. Iran's response was swift and economically potent: it closed the Strait of Hormuz again. The oil flows that had just been priced for peace halted once more. The brief respite was over.

While the headlines yo-yoed, the hard economic data landing on Friday morning captured the war's deep and lasting damage. The government reported that consumer prices rose 0.9% in March. That's the steepest monthly jump since June 2022, and it was driven almost entirely by one thing: gasoline.

Gas prices surged 21.2% in a single month. Let that number sink in. It's the largest monthly increase since the federal government started keeping records in 1967. The national average for a gallon of regular stood at $4.153 on Friday. To put that in perspective, it's up 39% from the $2.98 average the day before the war started. That's not just inflation; that's a shock to the household budget.

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, what came next. Shortly after the inflation report, the University of Michigan delivered another blow: its consumer confidence index had collapsed to 47.6 in April. That's not just low; it's an all-time record low since the survey began in 1953. It was also a sharp miss against Wall Street's already-gloomy forecast of 52.

Joanne Hsu, director of the university's Surveys of Consumers, put it plainly. Consumers are "very, very frustrated by the persistence of high prices" and are "feeling very weighed down with the cost of living." The data backed her up. Year-ahead inflation expectations among consumers jumped from 3.8% to 4.8% in a single month—the largest one-month surge since April 2025.

Here's where the story gets weird, or maybe just very Wall Street. Despite this grim backdrop of soaring prices and shattered consumer sentiment, the stock market decided to rally. The ceasefire announcement, however fragile, ignited a broad risk-on move.

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) gained 3.9% for the week, marking its best weekly performance since May 2025. The tech-heavy Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ), tracking the Nasdaq 100, pushed past the 25,000 level.

Some of the rally made intuitive sense. Michigan-based automakers, for instance, rebounded. General Motors Co (GM) rallied over 6% on the week, its best week since late 2025. Ford Motor Co (F) rose 5%. When the threat of an expanding war and spiking oil prices recedes, even temporarily, it's logical for car stocks to breathe a sigh of relief.

But not every sector got the memo. While the broad market celebrated, software stocks were getting hammered. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV) had its worst week in years. The pressure from artificial intelligence continues to reshape the tech landscape, and it's putting intense strain on legacy enterprise software valuations.

The poster child for this pain was ServiceNow Inc. (NOW). The stock plunged 18% this week. That wasn't just a bad week; it was its worst week since 2016 and the single worst performance in the entire S&P 500. In a week defined by a geopolitical rollercoaster and an economic shock, ServiceNow managed to stand out for all the wrong reasons.

So, to recap: A ceasefire sparked a crash in oil and a rally in stocks. Then new fighting sparked a partial recovery in oil. Meanwhile, the economic fallout from the past six weeks—in the form of historic gas price inflation—delivered a knockout blow to consumer confidence. The market, in its infinite wisdom, chose to focus on the hope of peace, however temporary, while Main Street was left staring at receipts from the gas station, feeling the weight of a cost-of-living crisis that shows no sign of easing. It was a week of whiplash, where the headlines from the Situation Room and the data from the Department of Labor told two very different stories about the state of the nation.