Daan Struyven, Goldman Sachs's head of oil research, raised the bank's US recession probability to 25%, driven by sustained crude price elevation from the strait of Hormuz supply disruption. Brent peaked at $126 per barrel this week — roughly 70% above the pre-war benchmark of $67.41 — before settling around $114. American households are collectively paying an additional $300 million per day at the pump, with national average petrol prices at $3.88 per gallon and California above $5.
The assessment follows Struyven's warning days earlier that Brent could exceed its 2008 all-time intraday record of $147.50 if Hormuz flows remain depressed for 60 days. The war is now 24 days old. The IEA has documented an 8 million barrel-per-day supply shortfall — the largest on record — and the 400 million barrels released from strategic petroleum reserves amount to roughly four days of global consumption. Neither the Treasury's sanctions waiver on 140 million barrels of Iranian crude nor Trump's 60-day Jones Act suspension addresses the underlying chokepoint: roughly a fifth of global petroleum trade passes through Hormuz in normal conditions, and the IRGC's selective toll system is replacing military blockade with commercial extraction rather than restoration of open passage.
A 25% recession probability from Goldman Sachs sits above the roughly 15% unconditional baseline that economists assign to any given year — the level at which institutional investors begin repositioning for contraction rather than slowdown. The figure measures the cumulative weight of a war fought over the world's most concentrated oil chokepoint: four weeks of disrupted flows, strategic reserves draining at emergency rates, charter costs quadrupled to $800,000 per day, and war-risk premiums of $3.6–6 million per voyage layered onto every tanker transit. Congressional opposition to the $200 billion war funding request adds fiscal uncertainty on top of energy-price pressure. Every week without resolution compresses the distance between Struyven's current estimate and a full recession call.
