Brent crude settled at $108.10 a barrel Friday, down 2.08 percent on the day after touching $114.66 intraday Thursday on the CENTCOM three-option briefing. [1] Hormuz remains closed to insured commercial traffic; CENTCOM's Friday operations summary recorded 45 commercial vessels turned back at the strait over the prior 96 hours. [2] U.S. retail gasoline averaged $4.39 a gallon nationally, the AAA Friday survey reported, unchanged on the week and 91 cents above the year-ago level. [3]

The paper's Thursday account of the CENTCOM briefing and Brent's $126 four-year high read the price move as duration risk, not throughput risk — the market pricing how long the blockade runs, not whether it runs. Friday's pullback re-tested the duration call. Trump's late-Friday letter to Speaker Johnson and the President pro tempore declaring Iran "hostilities terminated" produced a $6.50 prompt-month drop in two hours. The curve did not follow.

The shape is the story. The June contract closed at $108.10 against December at $94.20 — a $13.90 backwardation that deepened by $1.80 over the week. [1] Backwardation that steep prices a structural shortage in the front of the curve and an expected normalization at the back. The market is buying the war's end at six to nine months out and refusing to buy it for the next sixty days. The Trump letter moved the front; the back held. That is not a market that believes the letter.

The vessel-turnback figure is the operational evidence under the price. CENTCOM's Friday tally of 45 turnbacks since Tuesday is consistent with the Al Jazeera open-source investigation that named 185 vessels and 202 voyages crossing Hormuz in the four weeks since the blockade took effect — most of them under flags-of-convenience or Iranian-affiliated operators. [4] Insured Western tonnage is not sailing. The throughput that has continued is the throughput that does not require London marine insurance.

The retail-gas number is the political binding. AAA's Friday survey put the national average at $4.39 — within four cents of the $4.43 March 2022 wartime peak. [3] Eleven states are above $4.75; California is at $5.62; Pennsylvania, the Republican governor's office of Josh Shapiro confirmed Friday, is at $4.51 against a year-ago $3.42. [5] The Trump letter's "termination" language, in three of those eleven states, was already being quoted by Republican county chairs Saturday morning. The price needs to come down faster than the curve says it will for that quotation to remain useful past Memorial Day.

OPEC+ meets in Vienna Sunday for its eight-country ministerial, with the technical committee Monday. [6] The UAE's exit, effective midnight Friday, sits outside that room. Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman has not signaled a quota change in public; the Aramco Q1 print May 10 will be the first formal test of the kingdom's price-versus-volume preference. [6] The cartel's response, or its absence, will move the back of the curve more than the front. The front is a war story; the back is a policy story.

Two paths re-converge the curve. Either Hormuz reopens to insured traffic — which requires a CENTCOM stand-down or an Iranian de-mining concession the Pakistan-relayed proposal has not yet produced — or OPEC+ delivers a coordinated production response Sunday that absorbs the lost throughput at quota. Neither path has a public artifact attached to it on Saturday morning. The 45 turnbacks do.

The retail gas curve is the slower of the two clocks. Refiner margins on the East Coast are running at $32 a barrel, three times the 2024 average; the West Coast is at $48. [3] Those margins are the stored-up volatility — they will compress on the way down faster than crude does, but only after crude breaks. Until the front-month Brent print holds below $100 for a week, the political clock and the consumer clock keep running together. The Trump letter bought a day. The curve sold the day back.

-- PRIYA SHARMA, Delhi