WTI crude settled at $102.86 Monday, up $3.23 on the session — the direct market translation of Donald Trump's Financial Times interview, in which the president stated his preference for seizing Iran's oil infrastructure. The number is not a peak. It is a floor.

The S&P 500 closed March down 6.5%, its worst calendar month since September 2022. Brent crude, which the paper has been tracking since gas crossed $4 a gallon and the war came home for American consumers, closed above $103. The two numbers tell the same story from opposite ends: energy is repricing upward while everything that uses energy is repricing downward. The spread between them is the war premium, and it is now structural. [1]

The word "structural" requires precision. A war premium is structural when traders stop pricing the possibility of war ending and start pricing the possibility of war expanding. The Kharg Island comment crossed that threshold. Seizing Kharg — or attempting to seize it, which carries its own market consequences whether it succeeds or fails — would transform the Hormuz blockade from a temporary supply disruption into a permanent reorganization of Middle Eastern energy infrastructure. The market priced that possibility within an hour of the FT interview's publication. [2]

The S&P 500's 6.5% monthly decline is the headline. The detail is the composition: energy companies are up 18% in March while everything else has declined. This is not a market correction. It is a sectoral transfer — a systematic movement of wealth from consumers and industrial enterprises to oil producers, consistent with every major oil shock in the past fifty years and inevitable given Hormuz's role in global supply. The Federal Reserve, which has held rates at 3.25-3.75% and is expected to hold them there through the end of 2026, can do nothing about sectoral wealth transfer. Monetary policy addresses demand. It does not address supply shocks created by military operations in the Persian Gulf. [3]

The housing market is the civilian casualty of this equation. Mortgage rates, which follow the 10-year Treasury, are now at 6.49% — up from 6.18% at the start of March, driven by inflation expectations that the war has elevated and that the Fed cannot suppress without triggering a recession the administration does not want to acknowledge. Spring is when American housing markets move. Spring 2026 is frozen. The calculation a buyer makes at 6.49% on a median home price that has not declined proportionally to the rate increase is a calculation that produces "wait." [4]

March broke the market in the way that institutional breaks tend to happen: not with a single catastrophic day but with a thirty-day accumulation of certainty that the assumptions underlying equity valuations were wrong. The assumption that the war would be short was wrong. The assumption that Hormuz would reopen quickly was wrong. The assumption that Iran would accept the US peace terms was wrong. And now the assumption that the war's purpose was defensive — which justified a certain range of market outcomes — has been replaced by the knowledge that the war's purpose is to take the oil.

Taking the oil, if it happens, will produce a different market. It will also produce a different world.

-- HENDRIK VAN DER BERG, Brussels