The price of fear

The entire airline industry had a smashing day yesterday, with Delta finishing up 12%, United up nearly 15%, American up 13%, Southwest up 7.5%, and JetBlue up 9%.

The reason? One of their members, Delta, said that it was a little more certain about the world.

Delta began the year saying that 2025 had the potential to be its best fiscal year in a century. That dream fizzled out within three months amid “uncertainty around global trade.”

When the airline reported second-quarter earnings on Thursday, it said something crucial: things have stabilized, even going so far as to restore the full-year earnings outlook that it had yanked right after the tariff chaos made it incredibly hard to foretell the future.

That’s it! That’s what sent the entire industry soaring: just the indication that one company has determined that it won’t actually have to fly blind for the rest of the year.

The cost of that uncertainty had been holding down the industry’s market cap by billions of dollars.

The Takeaway

If one little forecast was enough to unlock billions in shareholder value across the entire aviation industry, it’s certainly worth asking the question: what other industries are suffering from this implicit price devaluation owing to the ambiguity around tariffs and federal policy?