Oil did not stay still. Brent crude futures for July closed at $107.77 on Tuesday, the third consecutive session of gains, as Iran's Wednesday deadline approached without a counter-text from Tehran. West Texas Intermediate for June settled at $102.18. Both benchmarks are up more than 45 percent since the US-Iran war began on February 28. [1]

The paper's coverage of the Hormuz oil warning as the deadline approached framed markets as watching. They watched, and they bought. Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said this week the market is losing roughly 100 million barrels of supply per week and warned that normalization slips into 2027 if Hormuz remains restricted past mid-June. [2] The price is not pricing rhetoric. It is pricing barrels that are not arriving.

That is the divergence. MSM frames each Brent uptick as a reaction to specific Trump or Khamenei statements. The energy desks on X are tracking the absence of a retrace: every "ceasefire holds" headline since early May has failed to pull crude back below $100. A market that does not retrace on de-escalation language is a market that has built a structural premium. The Wednesday deadline arrived inside that premium, not against it.

Iran has not closed the Strait. The market is acting as though something close to closure is already in effect. Both of those statements are true this morning.

-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem