Brent crude settled near $111.20 a barrel on Wednesday morning in London, up roughly 3% from Tuesday and capping an eighth straight session of gains. [1] WTI, the U.S. benchmark, climbed to $99.93, up $3.56 on the day. [1] The eight-day stretch is the longest unbroken rally since the war began on February 28.

The paper's Tuesday account of why $108 had become a household price story framed the rally as a pricing mechanism — a market translating a leaked U.S. plan to extend the Strait of Hormuz blockade into a forward curve. Wednesday's print is what that mechanism produces when it runs another day. Traders are no longer waiting to find out whether the war ends in May. They are pricing through May.

The proximate trigger remains the Wall Street Journal's report that President Trump told aides to plan a sustained Hormuz blockade rather than negotiate Pakistan's relayed Iranian offer. [2] The market is responding to a single sentence — that the blockade has a longer plan attached to it — by lifting the entire forward curve. Eight sessions of gains is not noise. It is a verdict.

Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi shared a proposal through Pakistan to reopen the strait in exchange for deferring nuclear talks; Brent climbed anyway. [3] When the price ignores the offer, the offer is not the news. The market priced the offer as already rejected before Washington publicly responded.

The supply backdrop hardens the call. ING, in a forecast revision Tuesday, lifted its Q2 Brent baseline to $104 from $96, and explicitly assumed flows through Hormuz would only "slowly start resuming" in May and June, "below pre-war levels for most of the year." [4] Goldman Sachs estimates global oil and gas production has been cut by 14.5 million barrels per day since the war began. [5] About 850 million barrels of supply have been lost across the first two months of the conflict. [4]

Vessel traffic tells the same story. Only eight ships crossed the strait on Sunday, down from 19 the day before, according to ship-tracking data cited by Al Jazeera. [5] Pre-war volumes ran above 100 vessels a day. The shipping data and the futures screen are no longer two charts. They are the same chart drawn at different scales.

The UAE's announced exit from OPEC and OPEC+ effective May 1 produced no offsetting move. Reuters' commentary noted what the price was already saying: Abu Dhabi cannot ship its barrels until Hormuz reopens, so its OPEC departure has no near-term price effect. [1] The cartel's "biggest existential crisis," as one analyst put it, sits in a queue behind the chokepoint.

The World Bank issued its own verdict Tuesday: it expects global energy prices to surge 24% in 2026 to their highest level since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. [6] The Bank's baseline still assumes a gradual Hormuz recovery, with risks "tilted to the upside." That phrase — tilted to the upside — is multilateral language for a forecast the institution does not believe is conservative enough.

What an eighth straight up day prices in is duration. A one-week scare resolves in one week. An eight-day rally on a leaked extension story prices in something else: that the blockade is the policy, not the punctuation. Goldman's June stockpile call — up to one billion barrels drawn from global reserves — is the back end of that curve. The front end is a market that has stopped asking when the war ends and started asking how it ends.

Brent's all-time high of $147 a barrel, set in July 2008, is no longer a distant data point. It is a ceiling traders mention when a blockade extension scenario stretches into June. [4] On Wednesday, the curve crossed $111 on its way to that conversation.

-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem