5 things to know before the market opens Thursday

Happy Thursday. I’m back after a long weekend skiing in Colorado, just in time for yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting.

Stock futures are lower this morning. The three major indexes are coming off a losing day.

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:

Oil prices continued to rally today, with Brent futures briefly topping $119 this morning after Iranian strikes on key energy infrastructure in the Middle East.

In an effort to stabilize volatile oil markets, President Donald Trump yesterday issued a 60-day waiver of the Jones Act — a U.S. shipping law that requires goods transported between U.S. ports be done so by domestic vessels.

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance and Energy Secretary Chris Wright are slated to meet with the oil industry today. U.S. governors and congressmembers will also attend the meeting at the American Petroleum Institute, a lobbying group representing major U.S. oil and gas firms.

Micron soared past Wall Street’s earnings and guidance expectations yesterday, but shares are down more than 5% this morning as investors take profit after the stock’s 350% run.

The company, which has benefited from skyrocketing demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units, has rushed to increase its memory capacity. Micron said yesterday that its quarterly revenue nearly tripled from the same period a year ago and that it expects current-quarter revenue to grow by more than 200% on a year-over-year basis.

Don’t miss Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” at 9 a.m. ET. Watch live on CNBC+ or the CNBC Pro stream.

Amazon wants to clear the air about its relationship with the U.S. Postal Service.

The e-commerce giant responded to reports that it planned to reduce the number of packages it sends through the Postal Service yesterday, saying in a blog post that the Post Office “walked away at the eleventh hour” of negotiations. Amazon said that it wanted to increase volumes under a new agreement, not reduce them.

The Postal Services’ contract with Amazon — which has long been its largest customer — is set to expire at the end of September. Negotiations between the two parties come as Postmaster General David Steiner warned this week that the mail carrier could run out of cash within a year.

Experts are warning that the U.S. unemployment system won’t be prepared if the economy falls into a recession.

A bipartisan recommendation says that top payments should cover at least two-thirds of workers’ prior average weekly wages. But an analysis shared exclusively with CNBC shows most states’ maximum benefits miss that mark.

“The big takeaway here is that with stagnant maximum weekly amounts, [unemployment insurance] is not going to be able to act as a stabilizer in 2026, even as well as it did in 2008,” said Michele Evermore, a senior fellow at the National Academy of Social Insurance.

— CNBC’s Jeff Cox, Darla Mercado, Sarah Min, Sean Conlon, Katie Tarasov, Jordan Novet, Kevin Breuninger, Spencer Kimball, Pippa Stevens, Annie Palmer, Annie Nova and Hugh Son contributed to this report. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.