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Everyone is watching the wrong thing this morning. The headline is that President Trump rejected Iran’s proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend. Oil jumped. Brent is back above $106. The pundits are calling it another setback for peace. They’re missing what actually happened. Iran offered to reopen the Strait within seven days if the U.S. lifted its naval blockade, released frozen assets, and eased sanctions. Six months ago, that offer would have been taken seriously. Hormuz was the single most valuable card Tehran held. Twenty percent of the world’s oil ran through it, and Iran could...

Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has moved back toward pre-war levels ... [Iranian] Oil exports have also collapsed ... Inflation is nearing 70%, food prices have more than doubled, and unemployment is above 9% ... youth unemployment at 20.1%

WASHINGTON — Iran’s beleaguered economy will soon have “nothing to trade” in about two weeks after it makes its final oil deliveries, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed. Bessent assessed that the Islamic Republic is becoming desperate to make a deal because of its collapsing economy, hastened by Operation Economic Outcast, and warned that its problems will get dramatically worse in two weeks. “I am confident, given that there’s only 15 million more barrels of Iranian oil on the water, that Iran will have nothing left to trade for anything,” Bessent told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” “Probably within the next...

Defying Iran and heading through the Strait of Hormuz is a gamble. But like all the best gambles, it is a lucrative one, so crews are inclined to fancy their odds. To counter the high insurance costs for buyers, countries such as Iraq and Qatar have been offering crude oil at steep discounts. “People just assume one ship in 12 or one ship in 15 is going to get hit by an Iranian drone, but you make enough money on the rest of them,” said Rory Johnston, founder of the market research firm Commodity Context.

At least two people have been killed and six injured in a "massive" overnight Ukrainian drone attack on the Moscow region, Governor Andrei Vorobyev has said. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said 450 drones heading for the capital had been shot down in what he called an "unprecedented attack". The city's main oil refinery was damaged and several homes were set ablaze. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed Kyiv had hit a "key" Russian oil facility and a logistics site in the region, representing "billions of dollars that sustain the war machine". The overnight attack is thought to be among the largest...

    Chronology of Attacks on Westerners in Saudi ArabiaMon May 31, 2004 08:50 AM ET LONDON (Reuters) - Suspected al Qaeda militants killed 22 civilians in Saudi Arabia at the weekend. Here is a short chronology of major attacks on Westerners in Saudi Arabia since 1995. Nov 13, 1995 - Five Americans and two Indians killed and 60 people wounded in an explosion in a car park near a U.S.-run military training center in Riyadh. June 25, 1996 - Bomb in fuel truck kills 19 American soldiers and wounds nearly 400 people at U.S. military housing complex in...

This is a short operational update posted by U.S. Central Command. Hi, I’m Admiral Brad Cooper, Commander of U.S. Central Command, here with a message to all Americans and an operational update on missions in the Middle East. CENTCOM forces have supported more than one billion barrels of crude oil leaving the Gulf. That’s one billion barrels of crude oil out through the Strait of Hormuz in the last couple of months. We’ve reached this significant milestone while assisting over 2,000 commercial ship transits through the Strait by providing coordinated protection. Clearly, momentum is building. Primary transit lanes in the...

Two days ago, the global media rushed to declare that the Iranians had outplayed Donald Trump and his blockade of Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. The IRGC's proxies in Yemen seized strategic turf in the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, damaging Saudi Arabia's pipeline and sending oil prices higher. The Telegraph reported that the IRGC was "hitting [Trump] where it hurts," while insisting that the Red Sea action effectively countered – or at least paralleled – the US Navy's total blockade of Iranian sea traffic:Iran's leaders were never going to passively submit to slow strangulation. Facing Donald Trump's blockade of their ports...

The war with Iran revealed just how much influence the world’s biggest oil importer has over prices and other countries’ supplies of jet fuel, gasoline and diesel. One of the most important lessons from the war with Iran is one that few saw coming. The conflict has made clear that China, which has long been highly vulnerable to oil supply shocks, has managed to transform that weakness into a surprising source of geopolitical power. The country made that big shift by stockpiling huge amounts of oil, building extra oil refining capacity and investing in coal and other alternatives. And in...

Crude oil prices dropped Wednesday as the Trump administration tried to reassure the market that Saudi Arabia's damaged East-West pipeline will restart operations in days. U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures shed 3.2% to close at $102.43 per barrel. Brent crude, the international benchmark, lost 2.7% to settle at $105.83 per barrel. Prices have rallied more than 16% this month as fighting has sharply escalated in the Persian Gulf. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNBC on Tuesday that the pipeline outage is a "brief and temporary interruption" that "will be measured in days." But independent analysts warned the pipeline could...

Saudi Arabia will run out of oil stocks for exports if it doesn't restart its major pipeline to the Red Sea within days, leading to a loss of up to 4% of global supply, Saudi oil buyers and traders said. A further decline in Saudi flows will worsen the global supply crunch, which has already pushed global fuel prices to record highs, spurred inflation around the world and sent U.S. bond yields to the highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis. Since drone attacks forced Saudi Arabia to shut its huge east-west oil pipeline on Friday, Riyadh has not given...

I'm sure you've already noticed, but oil prices are getting downright absurd. Now, those inflated costs are coming for Costco's motor oil. The wholesale retailer may be known for its solidly low prices, but even it can't help the fact that Crude Oil is trading around $100 per barrel right now. Because of that, it's upping prices and tightening how much it'll sell to any one person. While 10 quarts of Costco's Kirkland Signature full-synthetic motor oil used to set you back $30, and you could buy as much as your heart desired, those days are over — for the...

Saudi Arabia’s critical East-West oil pipeline system was struck on Thursday, with multiple pumping stations hit in an attack that could threaten one of the kingdom’s most important crude export routes, according to CNN, citing two U.S. officials familiar with the matter... ...OilPrice.com reported that NASA FIRMS had detected multiple large fires near the East-West pipeline, while Sentinel-3 imagery appeared to show a massive plume of black smoke stretching across western Saudi Arabia. One U.S. official said the attack involved drones originating from Iraq, although responsibility for the strikes has not yet been established... ...It also remains unclear whether the...

Stocks dropped Thursday after U.S. oil prices topped $100 a barrel, amid growing fears of higher inflation from a prolonged war in the Middle East. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 315 points, or 0.6%. The S&P 500 fell 0.5%, while the Nasdaq Composite slid 0.5% too. Higher oil prices continued to weigh on sentiment, as the war between the U.S. and Iran stretched into a seventh month. U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures for October jumped above $100 per barrel. Futures for the international benchmark Brent crude for November delivery spiked above $105 a barrel. The jump in oil prices...

In one of the most underreported happenings in the Persian Gulf conflict, Yemen’s internationally recognized government and allied militias have inflicted a series of ground setbacks on Iran-backed Houthi forces over the past month. These defeats are reversing parts of a late-summer Houthi push toward the Red Sea undertaken as part of the Iranian strategy of widening its conflict with the U.S. The Yemeni government is sufficiently confident in the new fronts that they now describe this as the start of a campaign to take the Houthi capital of Sanaa. The Iranian-backed Houthis have been Iran's key ace-in-the-hole for years....

Crude oil prices jumped 3% on Wednesday as fighting between the U.S. and Iran escalates in the Persian Gulf, raising investors fears that energy exports through the Strait of Hormuz will fall. Brent futures were up 3% at $100.86 a barrel by 8:29 a.m. ET. It is the first time the international benchmark has crossed the $100 threshold since July. U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures traded 3% higher to $95.84. The U.S. military destroyed five Iranian crude oil tankers Tuesday in retaliation for attempted attacks on an American warship. The U.S. warship successfully evaded Iranian attack and no American personnel...

The Argentine government has said that it will file criminal charges against oil company Navitas Petroleum for operating in seas off the Falkland Islands. The move came just days after Argentine President Javier Milei said he would sanction oil companies drilling in the British overseas territory in the south-west Atlantic Ocean. Sovereignty of the archipelago remains disputed between the UK and Argentina more than 40 years after a British military task force ejected Argentine forces which had invaded the territory in 1982. Speaking in the House of Commons on Tuesday, McNeill said that "the decision by the Falkland Islands government...

Strategic patience for the win? Iran's regime leaders thought they could force the US to buckle by strangling the global economy at the Strait of Hormuz. The US, however, has an actual blue-water navy, and that tends to matter in blockades involving a country entirely reliant on sea trade for its only valuable export economy. As the Wall Street Journal concedes, Donald Trump's Hormuz blockade is a lot less "leaky" than the IRGC's. And as Trump himself pointed out yesterday, the Strait may not matter for very much longer anyway:By squeezing the Strait of Hormuz, both the U.S. and Iran...

Iran is facing a potential economic disaster as the besieged Islamic Republic’s fuel reserves have dwindled to a paltry two-month supply, following months of punishing US bombing campaigns and a fresh wave of crippling economic sanctions. The US unleashed a barrage of secondary sanctions in recent weeks to choke off Iran’s supply of cash, restricting the rogue nation’s access to international financing networks and even blockading its oil exports. This is preventing Iran from doing everything from buying goods to securing foreign currency, and even forcing it to import gasoline because its refinery infrastructure has been decimated and there’s no...

If you've looked at gas prices lately you already know the conflict with Iran is still having a big impact on prices at the pump. However, there's a genuine disagreement over how much oil is currently making it through the Strait of Hormuz. This week the Trump administration has claimed that the total amount of oil passing through the strait is approaching pre-war levels. Here's a CNN report from yesterday.The US military escorted 40 commercial vessels carrying 18 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, marking a wartime high as Iran and the US exchanged a new round...