Oil Crashes Below $100 as Saudi Flows Recover and Diplomacy Stirs
Brent fell as much as 8% towards $95 — below $100 for the first time in twelve days, a fourth straight decline from last week’s $109 — as tanker data showed Saudi crude surging back through Hormuz: four million barrels a day of exports in September against August’s 2.4m, with shuttle tankers charging record fees for the passage. Mr Trump’s openness to meeting Iran’s president fed the slide. The warnings ran the other way: inventories have “5 to 10 weeks” before depletion, one analyst calculated, and American diesel set another all-time record.
The crash is a re-pricing of probability, not supply: the barrels returning through Hormuz travel under arrangements as fragile as the day’s diplomacy, and a market that adds $10 on a seized port and removes $11 on a presidential aside is telling you its inventories of certainty are as thin as its inventories of diesel. The five-to-ten-week depletion clock is the number beneath the relief — refined-product cover has halved in a fortnight’s estimates, which is why diesel records survive a crude crash and why any UNGA disappointment reprices violently. For Britain the sequencing is kind for once: pump prices follow crude down with a lag, just as the Budget’s drafters need the inflation forecast to bend. Watch the Trump-Pezeshkian question all week — this price now trades on a handshake’s odds.