Oil Spikes as Iran Fires Missiles at US Base, Trump Vows Retaliation – Moby BREAKING NEWS
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So, things aren’t going great in the Middle East at the moment.
After Iran fired ballistic missiles at a US base in Jordan early Wednesday (Centcom says they were shot down), Trump went on Fox News unsubtly promising to “beat the fucking shit” out of Iran. Oil didn’t wait for the details on that nuanced plan. Brent jumped 6.5% to $89.52, WTI added 6.3% to $84.26, and the brief de-escalation everyone had started pricing into crude this week evaporated in about the time it takes to read a headline.
That’s the breaking war news, but the numbers underneath at this point in the war should actually worry you.
Since Hormuz closed in February, the world has been running a supply deficit and quietly draining storage to cover it. The IEA’s audited number puts that draw at 6.3 million barrels a day across the whole conflict. The EIA had penciled in 7.6 million for the third quarter back in June, walked it down when a memorandum briefly reopened the strait, then watched that memorandum collapse along with everyone’s optimism. Nobody official has published a fresh number since. Two traders talking to Moby put the current draw closer to 7 million barrels a day and growing fast daily, back near the top of June’s forecast and despite the last published figure still sitting comfortably below it.
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Global oil reserves are on track to fall from about 2.8 billion barrels down to under 2.3 billion by December, roughly 50 days worth of the world’s demand. That sounds like a real cushion, except a lot of that oil is stuck in pipelines and the bottoms of tanks, physically impossible to pump out and sell. The oil anyone could actually use in an emergency is closer to 200 to 300 million barrels. At today’s faster burn rate, that’s only 30 to 43 days before this goes from being an energy market issue to the world genuinely starting to run short.
The tell that should worry you more is a different one entirely. Profits that refineries make turning crude into gasoline and diesel hit a four-year high in July, even as oil prices themselves were falling. That gap exists because the Middle East refineries that normally process much of this crude are sitting idle, forcing everyone else to pay up for the diesel and gasoline capacity that’s still running. Diesel moves trucks and cargo ships, so this is where our little oil war starts showing up in the price of groceries.