Brent Crude, the benchmark used to price most of the world's traded oil, fell more than 4.5% to below $95 a barrel on 27 May, a new low for the conflict, after Iran state TV signalled the strait of Hormuz could reopen1. By 28 May it had crept back to around $96, near the $98.83 it had reached on 26 May, as The White House denial of those draft terms circulated and the talks stayed stuck. The swing fed off a verbal signal and reversed when no signed paper followed.
Across nine days the slide runs deeper than any single session shows. Brent hit a conflict high of $112.10 a barrel on 18 May, fell below $100 a week later, then shed more than $17 in total as each hopeful signal failed to produce a text. UK forecourt prices typically track these moves within a fortnight, so the fall should ease pump costs over the coming weeks unless the trend reverses.
The physical strait tells a darker story than the price. Bloomberg ship-tracking logged just two inbound vessels through Hormuz on 27 May, with one Chinese fuel tanker pausing midway through an outbound run2. Two transits in a day leaves the chokepoint effectively shut to commercial traffic, a floor that has now held across several sessions.
Watch the gap between a falling benchmark and a near-closed strait. Brent is tracking the diplomatic headlines while the two-transit floor tracks the blockade, and when the two decouple this far the futures market is betting on a settlement the shipping data says has not begun. A collapse in the talks would reprice the war-risk premium upward fast, and any genuine reopening would first have to clear a backlog of stranded cargoes before supply normalised.
