Brent crude climbs above $90 a barrel
Ceasefire window lapses in US-Iran war talks and Trump threatens Oman, ship traffic through Strait of Hormuz falls to single digits
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Egyptian holidaymakers swim near the oil tanker ETC Ramsis in the Gulf of Suez Photograph: Amr Nabil/AP
theguardian.com
Oil prices rose above $90 a barrel this week after a two-month window for negotiations in the US-Israel war on Iran expired without a deal, according to The Guardian. Brent crude traded at $91.63 on Tuesday morning, the paper reported, after US President Donald Trump used a Fox News interview to demand Tehran “put up the white flag of surrender” and threatened to bomb Oman if it “gets in the way” of ending the war.
The move in prices is less about barrels already missing from the market than about what traders think could go missing next. The Guardian reports that the UK Maritime Trade Operations agency said a cargo ship was attacked while travelling through the Strait of Hormuz early on Tuesday, and Reuters cited an Iranian official saying Iran would shift to a more aggressive stance if talks failed. Fox News, cited by The Guardian, reported that Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari warned vessels attempting to pass through the strait would “find several beautiful holes in their hulls.”
Shipping data points in the same direction: only six commodity ships travelled through the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, slightly up from five over the weekend, according to ship-tracking company Kpler as cited by The Guardian. That is a thin flow for a chokepoint that normally underwrites global energy logistics, and it forces buyers and insurers to price disruption as a baseline rather than a tail event. Deutsche Bank analysts wrote that the rise in oil prices suggested investors were pricing in “a more extended closure” of the strait, The Guardian reported.
For Europe, the immediate transmission mechanism is not diplomatic language but import costs. Higher crude feeds into diesel, heating and industrial inputs, and then into consumer prices with a lag that central banks cannot easily offset without tightening into weak growth. The Guardian quoted Dan Alamariu of Alpine Macro warning of a “double whammy” if Middle East fighting persists alongside Russia’s war in Ukraine, with volatility and price spikes returning with any sustained Gulf escalation.
Trump also said he was “not in a hurry” to reach a deal and would not impose a fresh deadline on Iran, according to The Guardian. The market response has been to treat the absence of a deadline as a longer period in which the Strait of Hormuz can remain an intermittent battlefield.
On Monday, Kpler counted six commodity ships through Hormuz. On Tuesday, Brent was back above $90.