A War Closed Two Straits and Oil Still won’t Panic

By Mario Nawfal

One read from the trading desks: the market has decided this whole thing is transitory.

David Lin walked me through the receipts.

Gold spiked after Desert Storm, after 9/11, after the Ukraine invasion, and every geopolitical premium faded within months, with interest rates, not the shooting, setting the real price.

He sees the same discount applied now: five months of war priced as noise.

His read on why oil behaved goes further than weak economies.

China’s collapse in imports looks engineered to him, a deliberate halt rather than organic demand destruction, one that conveniently kept prices off the highs ahead of the midterms.

He flagged the Trump-Xi grand-bargain theory floating around and was blunt that no evidence supports it.

But with the reserve near its 1983 floor and a hard technical limit on further draws, his forecast is stark: $100 Brent by September without a ceasefire.

The gold logic ran opposite to the sales pitch.

Supply-shock inflation raises rate expectations, and higher rates punish an asset that yields nothing, which is why gold FELL as the war escalated.

The traders he talks to see a floor near $3,500-4,000 and nobody bullish short-term.

His most alarming number came from Seoul: roughly 1.2 MILLION accounts margin-called in a single week as the chip trade reversed, about 3 percent of South Korea’s adults.

He’s watching it as the canary for the AI rotation.

 

Original source: https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2079691885229048149