CNN published a phrase this week that has the uncomfortable quality of being both alarmist and accurate: the global oil crisis, the network declared, is "turning into an everything crisis." [1] The label captures what energy analysts have been tracking for weeks -- the point at which a supply disruption in one commodity begins cascading through every system that depends on it, which is to say, all of them.

J.P. Morgan's energy research team provided the analytical backbone for CNN's framing. According to the bank's latest briefing, the supply constraints will become more severe in April, not less. [1] The last of the crude oil deliveries dispatched before the Strait of Hormuz restrictions took full effect are now being consumed. Once those tankers are emptied, the physical scarcity that has so far been concentrated in Asia will spread westward through Europe and into the Americas. [1]

The bank has modeled oil prices reaching $120 to $130 per barrel in the near term, with a risk of surging above $150 if supply flows through the Strait remain disrupted into mid-May. [2] Those are not speculative numbers. They are calibrated to the transit data: roughly 20 percent of the world's fossil fuel supply chains flow through the Strait, and Iran's toll-and-inspection regime has reduced passage to a fraction of pre-war volumes.

The "everything" in CNN's formulation is not rhetorical. Jet fuel shortages are forcing airlines to reroute or cancel flights. Petrochemical feedstock constraints are hitting plastics, fertilizer, and pharmaceutical manufacturing. Diesel scarcity is disrupting trucking and agriculture across import-dependent nations from Australia to Kenya to the Philippines. [1] Each sector's crisis feeds the next: fewer fertilizers mean lower crop yields mean higher food prices mean political instability in countries that were already fragile.

What distinguishes this crisis from the 1973 oil embargo or the 2008 price spike is the number of systems affected simultaneously. The global economy has become more energy-efficient since the 1970s but also more interconnected. A disruption that once produced a gasoline line now produces a cascade across supply chains that were optimized for just-in-time delivery and low inventory costs. The efficiency that made things cheaper also made them brittle.

J.P. Morgan's most sobering projection is temporal. Even after the Strait of Hormuz reopens -- whenever that may be -- a full recovery to pre-war stockpile levels would take approximately four months. [2] The crisis, in other words, does not end when the shooting stops. It ends months later, after the pipeline has refilled.

April, by every credible model, will be worse than March. May depends on geopolitics no analyst can predict. The "everything crisis" label may prove to be the understatement.

-- DARA OSEI, London