The Double-Counted Barrel
EIA books the returning shut-ins twice — once as the 2027 glut that cuts Brent by $27, once as restored spare — while the cushion that exists prints 0.02 million b/d.
Before dawn on the 8th, CENTCOM put more than 80 targets under fire around the strait the entire document assumes open; by early Sunday the Revolutionary Guard had declared Hormuz closed after firing on a ship that strayed from the route Tehran now assigns; Iranian missiles reached American bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Oman and Qatar over the weekend; and on Monday the President reinstated the blockade by social-media decree, demanding for good measure that Washington be reimbursed 20 per cent of the value of every cargo its navy now protects — a toll on a strait, priced by the power that polices it, three days after I wrote in “The Twenty-Dollar Right of Way” that a fee enforced by a navy is a toll whatever the memorandum calls it.
The Twenty-Dollar Right of Way
For most of the past week the shooting has been at the western end of the system — Iranian missiles into three commercial hulls on Tuesday, in the waters off Oman where ships had been threading a route the northern corridor’s new managers do not control; two rounds of American strikes back across more than eighty Iranian military sites; Iranian fire on American positions in the Gulf states on Thursday; the ceasefire declared dead by the President on Wednesday; Brent finishing the week above seventy-six dollars, up more than six per cent, with Hormuz traffic collapsing from an average of thirty-three tankers a day the week before to thirteen on Wednesday, five overnight into Thursday, and Friday’s transits back to a near-standstill.
Brent finished Monday at $82.03. That is $0.12 …
