A U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports has shrunk Tehran's oil exports, stranding a growing stockpile of crude on tankers as Iranian storage sites run out of space, shipping data showed and analysts said. With some vessels switching off tracking systems and U.S. forces turning back Iranian tankers, how much crude Iran is delivering to customers, particularly main customer China, is impossible to measure. Just a handful of carriers carrying Iranian crude have left the Gulf of Oman between [Read more]

The Trump administration is seeking to loan up to 92.5 million barrels of crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to energy companies as it aims to calm oil markets that have spiked due to the war with Iran, it said on Thursday. The U.S. agreed in March to loan 172 million barrels from the SPR as part of a wider agreement with more than 30 countries in the International Energy Agency (IEA) to release about 400 million barrels to help relieve markets. Fatih Birol, the head of the IEA, has [Read more]

Why have global equity markets been so resilient to the Iran oil shock? Because $100 a barrel oil doesn’t mean what it used to. Brent crude has risen around 70% since the Iran war began on February 28 to over $120 per barrel, as of early Thursday. Yet global equity markets, though volatile, are still substantially back above pre-war levels. While there are many explanations, the key one is rooted in math. The head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, has described the current oil [Read more]

U.S. headline and core inflation are heading back above 3% once more, and inflation expectations for the year ahead are building a head of steam. The only crumb of comfort for the Federal Reserve is that long-dated price rise expectations are better behaved - but even these have been irked by the Iran-war-related oil shock. A relatively short energy market hiatus can be taken on the chin by most central banks for a while, but their big worry is that a protracted crude outage feeds the [Read more]

Iran's new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said in a published written message on Thursday that a new chapter for the Gulf and Strait of Hormuz has been taking shape since the Iran war with the United States and Israel broke out on February 28. Iran's Supreme Leader said that Tehran would secure the Gulf region and eliminate what he described as "the enemy's abuses of the waterway." The Supreme Leader added that new management of the Strait of Hormuz would bring calm, progress and economic [Read more]

The U.S. is pushing for other countries to form an international coalition to restore freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, according to a State Department cable seen by Reuters, as oil prices surged to their highest in more than four years on fears of longer-term disruptions to global fuel supplies. Two months into the war that started with U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, the vital sea channel remains closed, choking off 20% of the world's supplies of oil and gas. That has sent global [Read more]

J.P. Morgan on Thursday said the UAE could attract greater investments from U.S. companies once it is in a position to pump more oil after the country decided to leave the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries group. The fourth-largest producer in OPEC said on Tuesday it would exit the group on May 1. Key points from JPM's note: * The country's decision carries no immediate practical implications for its ability to produce and sell more oil, as the Strait of Hormuz is blocked. * [Read more]