Brent gave up two dollars on Monday because Trump said he would probably meet Iran’s president.
|
Monday, September 21, 2026 |
|
The Last Page.
The last page, first.
|
|
Oil Gave Up Two Dollars on a Maybe
The President said Sunday he would probably meet Iran’s president in New York this week. Tehran’s security chief spent the same weekend promising a decisive war.
|
|
The story
Oil fell for a third straight day on Monday. Brent traded at $101.71 and West Texas crude slipped to $98.15. Both are the lowest they have been since September 10.
The reason is a maybe. Trump told Fox News on Sunday he would probably meet Iran’s president in New York this week. Masoud Pezeshkian said he was probably open to it too.
Mohsen Rezaei runs Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. He said over the same weekend that another American strike was “very much on the cards.” Iran is ready for a “decisive war,” he added.
The market took the meeting and set the war talk aside.
That decision reaches you at the fuel pump. Later than it reaches the screens.
|
|
$5.599
Diesel, national average, August 31.
|
|
$5.967
September 7, the week the strikes reached Kharg Island.
|
|
$6.285
September 14. That is 68.6 cents in two weeks, and it rides on everything a truck carries.
|
|
|
War-risk cover
|
Extra insurance a ship buys to cross a war zone. It is priced as a share of the ship’s value and charged every trip.
|
|
|
Best case
MARCH 2027. The two men met in New York after all. A framework came together over the winter. By February the Navy had stood its blockade down and Iranian barrels were back on the water.
Underwriters cut the Hormuz rate toward one percent. Ships that spent the summer refusing Gulf work took it again. Freight came down with the insurance.
Refiners stopped paying a premium to get crude to the coast. Diesel went under five dollars in February for the first time in more than a year.
You noticed it in the grocery aisle first, because everything in there arrives on a truck. A dollar and a quarter off a gallon is about thirty dollars a fill on a twenty-five gallon tank.
Brent in the seventies. Nobody mentions a hundred any more.
|
|
Worst case
|
DECEMBER 2026. Nobody met in New York, and nobody expected to by then. The week at the United Nations ended with a speech and a warning. The first strike came nine days later.
A loading terminal on the Saudi side of the Gulf burned for two days. Underwriters did in the winter what Marsh’s Marcus Baker warned about in July. Some of them stopped offering cover for a Hormuz crossing at all.
Freight with it. Diesel went through seven dollars in November and kept going. The food on the shelf and the oil in the tank both moved at the new price.
Your heating bill arrived in January with a number you read twice. The market that took two dollars off the barrel in September went back through the $107 it touched earlier this month.
|
|
|
How it ends
You get a cheaper barrel and the same fuel bill this winter, unless the war-risk rate comes off the hulls.
That two dollars came out of a rumor about a meeting. The thing that put the barrel up there is still running. Central Command said this weekend that it has moved more than a billion barrels through the strait. Saudi exports are running again too, back above four million barrels a day this month from 2.4 million in August.
It calls that an ironclad blockade, and it holds Iran’s own exports at zero. None of that is cheap. Breakwave Advisors put the war-risk rate for a Hormuz crossing at 7.5 to 12.5 percent of hull value.
Before the war it was about a quarter of one percent. On a hundred-million-dollar tanker that is millions of dollars a voyage. The cost is the same whether the barrel prices at eighty or at a hundred and ten.
An insurance book reprices slowly, and only once the shooting has a signed end. You can see the gap on your own receipts. Gasoline is up a dollar fifteen in a year, and diesel is up two dollars fifty-five.
We ran it both ways. Diesel is what the truck runs on, so the freight cost keeps its own schedule. Call the fuel bill flat into the new year.
|
|
|
The Energy Information Administration posts one national diesel average every Monday afternoon. It was $6.285 a gallon on September 14, up 68.6 cents in two weeks while crude was falling. Watch whether that number turns down and holds under six dollars through October.
|
|
|
We finish one story every weekday morning and then we get out of your inbox. If this is not the letter you wanted, the exit is below.
|
|
The Last Page.
The last page, first. Reply and name the story you want finished.
|
|
|
