🗞️ THE DAILY INDEX - 20th July 2026

Tokyo woke up Friday to a stock market rout, and by the closing bell the Nikkei 225 — Japan's benchmark index, similar to the Dow — had fallen more than 4% in a single session, officially entering what traders call a "correction," a drop of 10% or more from a recent peak. The trigger was the same one that's been rattling markets for days: growing doubt about whether the eye-watering sums being poured into artificial intelligence infrastructure will actually pay off. That doubt spread from Wall Street's chipmakers to Hong Kong, to mainland China, and dragged the Daily Business Index — our daily 0-to-100 readout of global business health, where 50 marks neutral — down to 48.0. But this wasn't a simple bad day. Oil spiked on renewed Middle East hostilities even as American shoppers turned out to be far more confident than anyone expected.