Brent Crude settled at $104.21 on Monday 11 May, up $2.92 (2.9%) on $101.29 the previous session1. The move broke the $101 floor that had held through Friday's bulk-carrier strike near Doha, the Mokhber doctrine declaration and the IRGC firing-order threat. Nothing signed underwrote the spike: it came on Donald Trump's Oval Office verbal statement, with no executive order, deployment directive or CENTCOM operational order behind it. Brent traded above $94 on Tuesday morning, holding most of Monday's gain.
Saudi Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser said the same day that the market is losing roughly 100 million barrels of supply each week and that prolonged disruption could push any normalisation into 20272. That weekly loss roughly equals Saudi Arabia's full weekly output. Translated into a daily run rate against the notional 80 million barrels per day global crude base, Nasser's number implies a 17.5% supply shock against a curve that has not priced it.
Brent at $104.21 prices the market's probability-weighted average of paper outcomes, not Nasser's physical-market reading; priced literally, Nasser's number justifies materially higher Brent. The ceiling holds while Wall Street still expects a deal; it breaks upward if Trump signs a bombing order on his Friday return, or downward if he signs a written counter-text. For UK consumers the lag template is already running: the $4.54 per US gallon pump benchmark hit on 8 May is the precedent forecourts will follow within a fortnight, putting roughly £1.78 per litre on UK pumps before the Beijing trip closes.
