Hormuz Holds: Markets Outlasted a Crisis Nobody Modelled
The Strait of Hormuz — twenty-one miles of water at its narrowest point — carries roughly a fifth of the world's daily oil supply.
Hormuz Holds: Markets Outlasted a Crisis Nobody Modelled
The Strait of Hormuz — twenty-one miles of water at its narrowest point — carries roughly a fifth of the world's daily oil supply. When the US-Iran war severed that corridor, the assumption in every trading room from London to Singapore was that the disruption of approximately 20 million barrels a day would send energy markets into freefall. According to a Bloomberg Intelligence special report, that assumption was wrong.
Markets proved more resilient than forecasters had modelled. The reasons were structural: emergency reserve releases from the International Energy Agency, accelerated output from Gulf producers with alternative export routes, and a demand-side contraction that cushioned the supply shock faster than historical crises would have predicted. Turkey's central bank, watching inflation refuse to yield, kept its policy rate at 37% and resumed weekly repo auctions — a signal, per Bloomberg, that Ankara does not believe the worst of the commodity pressure has passed.
What the Bloomberg report does not dwell on is the question underneath the data: resilience for whom. Importers in South and Southeast Asia — nations with fewer reserve buffers and harder currency constraints — absorbed the price spike differently than markets in Frankfurt or New York. Adaptation is not evenly distributed. The Strait did not close forever, but for the economies that felt every week of disruption in food and fuel costs, the crisis was not a stress test. It was a year.
The water is open. The accounting is not finished.
