US equity markets opened lower on Monday. The Dow Jones fell 543 points (1.1%), the S&P 500 dropped 1.1%, and the Nasdaq lost 1.6% — steeper than pre-market futures had indicated but within the range of orderly decline.
The equity losses are secondary to the oil signal. Brent Crude held at $85–90 per barrel, the same range it reached over the weekend, up from roughly $73 before the strikes began. The price has stabilised rather than continuing to climb, despite Strait of Hormuz vessel traffic falling 70% and six major container lines — CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, Maersk, Nippon Yusen, Mitsui, and Kawasaki Kisen — halting Gulf transits entirely. OPEC+'s 220,000 barrel-per-day production increase and the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve's 415 million barrels provide a buffer, but neither addresses the core vulnerability: roughly one-fifth of the world's traded oil transits the Hormuz Chokepoint.
Goldman Sachs has forecast a Brent peak of $110 per barrel; JP Morgan projects $120–130 if the conflict is prolonged and raised its US recession probability to 35%. The $20–45 gap between current pricing and those forecasts measures the escalation risk the market has not yet absorbed.
A spike followed by retreat would indicate short-term panic. A sustained elevated range — which is what the data shows — indicates institutional positioning for weeks of disrupted supply. Gen. Caine confirmed in Sunday's Pentagon briefing that the US expects "additional losses." CMA CGM's emergency surcharge of $2,000–$4,000 per container will flow through to consumer prices within weeks, while the crude increase compresses margins for energy-intensive industries from European manufacturing to Asian petrochemicals. The question is no longer whether the conflict affects the global economy, but at what rate the costs accumulate.
