Repayable on Demand

The funds sold 245 million paper barrels into a quarter that OPEC's own ledger shows 6.4 million barrels a day overdrawn — on Tuesday the strait began calling the facility in.

Two of ADNOC's supertankers, the Al Bahyah and the time-chartered Mombasa B, were hit before dawn on Tuesday in the southern lane of the Strait of Hormuz — one Indian seafarer killed, eight injured, both hulls damaged — and by the time the US Navy's reinstated blockade of Iranian ports took effect at four in the afternoon Washington time, Brent had touched $87, pulled back on the withdrawal of a proposed 20 per cent transit levy, and settled at $84.73 — before a fourth consecutive night of strikes, seven hours of them, ran along Iran's coastline while Europe slept.

Read that settle against the document that landed from Vienna twenty-four hours earlier: OPEC’s July Monthly Oil Market Report spent its opening pages explaining June’s collapse — the Reference Basket down $24.80 on the month to $89.75, ICE Brent down $19.28 to an average of $84.43 — and within a day of publication the front month was trading above the average it had just finished autopsying.

The report reads better as a ban…