On Sunday morning, a tanker captain somewhere in the Gulf of Oman got a phone call. Not from Iran. Not from the U.S. Navy. From his insurance company. |
Your war-risk coverage is canceled. Turn around. |
He wasn't the only one. Within 24 hours, tanker traffic through the Strait dropped from 24 ships a day to four. Three of those four were flying Iranian or Chinese flags. Everyone else went home. |
No blockade. No mines. No warship fired a shot. An underwriter in London shut down one-fifth of the world's oil supply with a phone call. |
That's the part of this war I can't stop thinking about. |
We're all watching the missiles on cable news. The body counts. The politics. But the thing that's going to hit your wallet hardest? It's not a bomb. It's the fact that nobody will insure a ship to cross a 21-mile stretch of water between Iran and Oman. |
And that tells us something important about how fragile the whole setup was before the shooting started. |
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Let me put some numbers on this so you can see what I mean. |
About 21 million barrels of oil flow through that strait every day. That's one-fifth of the world's supply. Squeezed through a gap 21 miles wide. On a good day, that's already the thinnest margin in global energy. One bad weekend and the whole thing breaks. |
This was that bad weekend. |
Qatar shut down the world's biggest natural gas export plant. Gas prices in Europe almost doubled in two days. Oil jumped from $73 to over $82 a barrel. And insurance costs for a single tanker crossing spiked twelve times over. |
Trump said the Navy would escort tankers through. That helped calm things down a bit. But the insurance companies didn't budge. They're still adding $5 to $15 per barrel just in premiums. So even with a destroyer riding shotgun, shipping oil through Hormuz costs a fortune right now. |
Here's what bugs me about all this. |
For two years, the stock market has been telling us a nice story. Inflation is cooling. The Fed is about to cut rates. The economy is fine. Buy stocks. |
That story runs on one thing: cheap energy. Cheap gas at the pump. Cheap shipping. Oil that flows freely from the Gulf without anyone asking hard questions. |
But even before the bombs started falling, the cracks were showing. Wholesale prices were already climbing. The cost of raw goods hit a level we haven't seen since 2022. Oil was up 17% from a year ago. Gas at the pump was creeping higher week after week. |
The "inflation is over" story was already in trouble. The war just kicked the door down. |
There's one more thing that's been nagging at me. It's a little nerdy but bear with me because it matters. |
When the world gets scared, people usually rush to park their money in the safest place they know: U.S. government bonds. It happened after 9/11. It happened in 2008. It's what we've come to expect. America is the rock. |
This time? The rush didn't come. Money isn't pouring into our bonds the way it used to. It's actually going the other way. Maybe it's the debt. Maybe it's the politics. But the old reflex "when in doubt, buy America" didn't kick in. |
That's new. And I think it's worth paying attention to. |
Now, I'm not saying sell everything and hide in a bunker. Wars end. This one will too. Maybe in weeks. Maybe longer. Nobody knows, and anyone who says they do is guessing. |
But the thing it just exposed? That's not going away when the shooting stops. |
U.S. oil production is basically flat this year. It's expected to shrink next year. We spent years not drilling enough new wells because everyone was worried about "stranded assets" and the energy transition. That means there's no quick fix on the supply side. |
Meanwhile, over 75% of the world's spare oil sits in four countries that border the Persian Gulf. The usable spare is about 2% of what the world burns every day. That's a razor-thin cushion when there's a war next door. |
And here's the part that really gets me. Iran doesn't need to win a military victory. It just needs to keep the Strait scary enough that no insurance company will touch it. Every day that holds, oil stays expensive, prices keep climbing, and the Fed can't cut rates without pouring fuel on inflation. |
The weapon isn't a missile. It's a 21-mile bottleneck that an underwriter can shut down faster than any general can open. |
The global economy still runs through that gap. We still can't drill our way out of a supply shock fast enough. And most portfolios are still built for a world where none of this matters. |
It matters now. |
— Lauren
Editor, American Ledger |
*Disclaimer: This is a paid advertisement for RAD Intel made pursuant to Regulation A+ offering and involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. The valuation is set by the Company and there is currently no public market for the Company's Common Stock. Nasdaq ticker "$RADI" has been reserved by RAD Intel and any potential listing is subject to future regulatory approval and market conditions. Brand references reflect factual platform use, not endorsement. Investor references reflect factual individual or institutional participation and do not imply endorsement or sponsorship by the referenced companies. Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.radintel.ai. |
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