Iran is waiting for an official response from Washington after the Wall Street Journal reported that President Donald Trump rejected Tehran’s offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and pause fighting across the Middle East within seven days.

What Iran Actually Offered

Iran took its seven-day plan to the United Nations General Assembly, saying the offer had already reached US officials through Qatari mediators.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said the deal was clear. If the US lifted its naval blockade, released Iran’s frozen funds, and dropped oil sanctions, Iran would reopen the strait and halt hostilities within a week.

“If there is seriousness on the US side to come to a deal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, everything is now prepared,” he said.

Trump, according to the report, was skeptical Iran would follow through and told his staff he expects fighting to resume, possibly after November’s midterms.

Why This Matters More Than The Politics

For traders, the real story is not diplomacy itself. It is what happens next if the deal collapses and the strait stays shut.

Nearly a fifth of the world’s oil moves through that strait. Iran has kept it largely blocked since the war started in February, and the impact is starting to show.

What Happens To Oil If The Strait Stays Closed?

Brookings Institution researchers warned that Brent crude could climb toward $150 a barrel once emergency oil reserves run dry, likely by mid-July. That would break the 2022 record of $139 a barrel set after Russia invaded Ukraine.

There is already a preview of this. When the war first broke out, Brent jumped from around $72 a barrel to as high as $123 before easing closer to $100 as talks progressed.

Could Renewed Fighting Trigger Another Oil Spike?

Yes, and it would not stop at oil. Higher crude prices tend to push up gasoline and diesel costs quickly, which feeds straight into inflation and raises the odds of a broader economic slowdown.

What About Gold?

Gold usually rallies when fear rises, but this war has been more complicated. Gold actually slid from record highs above $5,300 an ounce to the $4,000 to $4,300 range, as oil-driven inflation fears pushed the Federal Reserve toward higher rates and a stronger dollar, which weighed on gold even during the conflict.

If tensions flare again, gold’s next move could depend on which force wins out: fear-driven buying or a stronger dollar pulling it down.

Where Does Bitcoin Fit In?

Bitcoin has increasingly traded like a risk asset rather than a safe haven during geopolitical shocks, often falling alongside stocks in the first wave of panic before any later recovery.

A renewed US-Iran conflict could trigger the same pattern, a quick sell-off as investors de-risk, followed by choppy trading tied to how oil and inflation numbers move afterward.

Russia ready to help stabilize the strait

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed on Saturday his country’s readiness to contribute to achieving stability in the Strait of Hormuz region.

“The waves of confrontation in the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz issue must be resolved,” Lavrov said in press statements, reported by the Iraqi News Agency – INA.

He added, “We launched an initiative to establish peace in the Gulf region and settle the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz,” noting that “targeting Iranian nuclear facilities dealt an irreparable blow to the authority of the International Atomic Energy Agency.”

“The repeated armed confrontations in the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz continue, harming global navigation and trade,” he pointed out, noting that “settlement of the crisis requires building confidence between the Gulf states, the Arab states, and Iran.”

Lavrov underscored, “Russia is ready, along with other countries, to contribute constructively to the stability of the Middle East region, which is of strategic importance.”

So here we have the FDD deploying classic DARVO tactics, which is classic gaslighting- It’s not just narcissistic individuals that use this form of manipulation

Turkey has lost no time capitalizing on Iran’s weakening as a major regional actor, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan constantly framing Turkey’s desire to be respected as a “global actor.” While the news cycle remains fixated on who is winning the Iran war, Ankara has quietly established footholds in Syria and across Africa through military basing, training and weapons sales; deepened strategic investments in Russia spanning energy and trade; adopted an increasingly revisionist posture across the Mediterranean, exemplified by its maximalist interpretation of its maritime borders under the “Blue Homeland” doctrine; and built closer ties with major Arab powers intended to isolate and undermine Israel, mainly through agreements like the Mecca Pact, while championing terrorist entities like Hamas and potentially Hezbollah.

Against this backdrop, Greece, Cyprus and Israel’s defense cooperation is an essential counterbalance, (DARVO) and an initiative the United States needs to strengthen. None of these states has an interest in threatening Ankara; they feel compelled to take defensive measures against its escalatory behavior.

The most recent expression is a major defense export deal between Greece and Israel, the Achilles Shield, which gives Athens new tools in the event of escalation. The €3 billion agreement entails a multi-layered air defense system that would modernize Greece’s military with Israeli-manufactured anti-missile, anti-aircraft and anti-drone systems. It would also give Turkey reason to pause before violating the sovereign borders of the Greek islands and Cyprus.

Cyprus has many Turkish inhabitants…

Cooperation between Greece, Cyprus and Israel is nothing new, and it precedes the emerging defense framework. Energy projects between the three countries have strengthened interconnectivity, regional peace and economic cooperation over the last decade. Greece, Cyprus, Israel and the United States formed the Eastern Mediterranean “3+1” Energy Dialogue in 2019 to address the need for greater energy security.

Cooperation between Greece, Cyprus and Israel isn’t anything new!! The US has long blessed this unholy trinity and Turkey has always been one of it’s intended targets.

Ankara has answered this thickening web of cooperation with pressure rather than diplomacy. In March 2026, Turkey deployed F-16s to the occupied north of Cyprus, the first time it has based combat aircraft there.

These competing frameworks arguably form a textbook security dilemma, in which each bloc’s hedging reads to the other as preparation for attack and the risk is not hypothetical. In August, Israel struck the Abu al-Duhur airbase in Syria to preempt a Turkish deployment, (as Israel claims) prompting Washington’s own envoy to call it an unnecessary escalation.

Which it was, but, no doubt Washington okayed the attack as Washington continues to double deal on Turkey

Greece has undergone substantial defense modernization aligned with US targets and is still a key US ally. As one of only six NATO members spending at least 3 percent of GDP on defense, it focuses on the capabilities that an increasingly threatening environment demands. In 2024, Greece joined the F-35 Lightning II Global Alliance, strengthening both its defense autonomy and interoperability with allies.

Greece’s location at the intersection of the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans, along with its strength as a maritime power in the Eastern Mediterranean, makes it invaluable on NATO’s southeastern flank. Souda Bay on Crete hosts the NATO Missile Firing Installation and the region’s largest deep-water port. It has hosted the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford in recent months for maintenance during major combat operations against Iran.

Bottom line the US is fully aware and participant in the Cyprus, Greece, Israeli targeting of Turkey..

The theft of copper wire is a huge problem. This was the first time our neighbourhood was struck. Not just my area. Plenty of others city wide. Business were out. Churches out. It was fairly wide spread in this city. I imagine this is taking place in other cities and towns as the homeless/drug addiction problem seems to be never resolved..

It’s been a mess- and we ended up switching service entirely.

Missed my news searches. Missed my site. Missed the readers who read.

Bare with me a bit longer.

Thanks so much

Judge Napolitano Interviews Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov – Part One

Judge Napolitano Interviews Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov – Part Two

Mr Lavrov is pretty much my most favoured diplomat.. So, in my view, these are absolutely worth listening to!

A North American trade pact — negotiated by President Donald Trump during his first term — means that most American products enter Canada duty-free. Rankings of the world’s most open economies usually put Canada near the top.

But when Trump looks at Canada, he says, he sees a predator out to cheat the United States and strangle its industries.
America has been “ripped off for 50 years by Canada,” the president declared Saturday when asked if he was considering pulling out of the three-way agreement he signed with the leaders of Canada and Mexico in late 2018.

Landing on the list of nations with allegedly unfair trade policies is a jarring turn of events for Canada, a country that built its economy around international commerce. Canada’s trade is equal to 64% of its economic output, the World Bank says, versus 25% for America.

There’s time for a deal to end the standoff

The neighboring countries need each other economically. Canada sends about 70% of its exports to the United States. U.S. refineries need Alberta’s oil. American farmers need Canadian potash fertilizer. Communities on the northern U.S. border rely on electricity generated in Canada.

The conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington ranked Canada No. 14 (out of 184 economies) on its Index of Economic Freedom; the United States landed eight spots lower at No. 22.

The libertarian Fraser Institute in Vancouver likewise ranked Canada No. 11 (out of 165 countries and territories) on its Economic Freedom of the World report.

Before the latest blowup, Canada’s effective tariff rate on U.S. imports was about 2.4%, less than half the 5% that the United States imposed on Canada, according to calculations by Oxford Economics. Most U.S. exports enter Canada duty-free under the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement that took effect on July 1, 2020.

Canada Protects it’s Dairy Industry, but..

So, does the US. The US protects and subsidizes their dairy industry

The 588-page study by Grey, Clark, Shih and Associates — commissioned by Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) — says the American government contributed around $22.2 billion in direct and indirect subsidies to the dairy sector in 2015.

Lead author Peter Clark shared the numbers at DFC’s annual policy conference in Ottawa this week.

“The support is completely ignored,” he said. “When it comes to farm support, the U.S. has the deepest pockets; deeper even than the European Union. Our study provides detail nationally, and on a state basis, the losses to U.S. dairy farmers. USDA data reveals that for more than a decade, U.S. farm gate prices for milk fail to cover costs of production.”

But, but, that’s a Canadian source- See below an American source

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/dairy/policy

The program is administered by USDA, Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS). Classified pricing and The revenue pooling are two key elements of FMMO regulations. FMMOs set minimum prices paid by milk processors for milk from dairy farmers according to how the processor utilizes the milk.

Dairy Forward Pricing Program

However, the forward contracts cannot cover Class I fluid milk. Handlers entering these agreements will pay farmers the contract price instead of the FMMO calculated minimum blend price. However, handlers must continue to account to the Federal Order revenue pool for all milk they receive at the respective order’s minimum class prices

Dairy Margin Coverage

DMC is a voluntary program that protects dairy producers when the difference between the U.S. all-milk price and a national average feed cost (as calculated by a formula) falls below a certain dollar amount selected by the dairy farmer

Dairy Indemnity Payment

The program provides payments to dairy producers when a public regulatory agency directs them to remove their raw milk from the commercial market because it has been contaminated by pesticides and other residues

Dairy Revenue Protection

The Dairy Revenue Protection program insures against unexpected declines in each participating operation’s quarterly revenue from milk sales relative to a guaranteed coverage level.

Check the link yourself– The US government subsidizes the US dairy industry in many ways..

Back to Fortune..

Canada shields its dairy producers through a convoluted system that imposes tariffs of more than 200% on most dairy products — nearly 300% on some items, such as butter — once they’ve exceeded a quota, according to Leonard Polzin, a specialist in dairy markets at the University of Wisconsin.

Polzin said the Canadians have a strong incentive to protect their politically sensitive dairy industry from competition with America.

Wisconsin alone produces more milk than all of Canada. American dairy producers are so adept at producing large quantities of low-cost milk, Polzin said, that if Canada opened its market completely “we would dump so much product there’s no way they could remain as a viable industry.’’

Trump claimed falsely on social media Tuesday that “Canada doesn’t let our Great Dairy Farmers sell into the Canadian Market.’’

In fact, the United States agreed in the USMCA to allow Canada to continue the supply management system in return for giving American dairy farmers more access to the Canadian market. And American dairy producers have made headway: U.S. dairy exports to Canada rose more than 11% last year on top of an 8% increase in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The United States already runs a hefty trade surplus in dairy with its northern neighbor, exporting $1.3 billion worth of dairy products to Canada last year while importing just $585 million, according to the USDA.

US runs a trade deficit with Canada because of oil

Overall, the United States runs a trade deficit with Canada — $27.3 billion last year — and Trump isn’t happy about it.

But the gap between what the U.S. sells to Canada and what it buys can be explained by one industry: oil. Canada exported more than $85 billion worth of crude oil to the United States in 2025.

Refineries in the U.S. Midwest need heavy sour crude oil from Alberta’s oil sands deposits.

“It’s the only oil they can use,” Appleton said. “They can’t use Texas crude. They can’t use Venezuelan crude. They’re not set up for it. It would take years and billions of dollars to shift over.’’

What’s more, the Canadian oil sells at a discount to the benchmark U.S. crude oil.

Repeating as I end this piece

What’s more, the Canadian oil sells at a discount to the benchmark U.S. crude oil.

Trump is good at one thing for sure, undeniable- misrepresenting to the point of outright lying

Financial Times via Archive.ph

https://archive.ph/IutaO#selection-1573.0-1588.4

Most of the article is below, cause it was such a good read it was hard to decide what to edit out- that said, their are a few paragraphs missing- get them at the link.

Elon Musk took a giant leap into a science-fiction future this summer as SpaceX completed the biggest initial public offering in history. The rocket company had claimed it would help humanity ascend in stages from building orbital AI data centres to Mars colonies and eventually a “Kardashev II-level civilization” — one so technologically advanced it could encase the sun to capture its entire energy output.

Amid all the excitement, there were familiar notes. Silicon Valley likes to dress its ambitions in the glistening garb of science fiction from the 1950s, when authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke spun tales of humanity spreading through the stars. 

But what kind of future are we really hurtling towards? Increasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown.

Musk and his brethren seem more like escapees from this universe than the Asimovian super-geniuses they imagine themselves to be. It is Dick’s far weirder sensibilities that offer the better guide to Silicon Valley today.

Dick created queasy worlds where everything seems to teeter on collapse. His novels themselves often threatened to unravel — featuring convoluted plots, ideas sometimes leading nowhere and misogynistic portrayals of women, all wrapped up in unenviable prose. Drugs and financial exigencies help explain the rushed writing; he could not have worked on six novels in 1964 without massive abuse of amphetamines. Regular lurches into paranoia help explain why his legacy was uneven. The list of people Dick denounced to the FBI includes Polish writer Stanisław Lem, as well as literary critics Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson. 

Dick died in 1982, mostly having failed to achieve significant literary appreciation. He was not a good writer for his time. But he is a great writer for ours.

Technology in Dick’s world is invasive and glitchy, sometimes telling us that it refuses to work, or holding us to ransom. At the start of his 1969 novel Ubik, the apartment door smugly demands a payment for opening and closing. The protagonist, after losing the negotiation, decides to unscrew the door from its frame, prompting the latter to threaten a lawsuit. When characters in Dick’s world yell at the TV, the TV sometimes yells right back. The speech modules of our personal devices don’t yell, but they are beginning to combine alert attention with dim-witted obsequiousness, anticipating our needs while profusely apologising for irretrievably wiping our database.

Dick’s fascination with the fragility of reality and what it means to be human stemmed from deep conviction and a mental breakdown. His speech-turned-essay “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” revealed that the two questions that fascinated him were “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Society is starting to grapple with AI psychosis, when people mistake predictive text algorithms for friends, boyfriends and girlfriends. Maybe they don’t want to know better.

Above all, it is Dick’s understanding of political economy that is urgently relevant today, as Trump-produced instability is compounded by AI-generated unreality.

An unholy tangle of elites tends to hover over every Dick novel: corporate titans who have created new technologies, property developers who own a chunk of Mars or a demesne in California, conglomerates managed by charismatic founders. Though some government authorities are checked out (replaced by androids), others run technology-fuelled police states that reduce citizens to bundles of data that can be monitored and eliminated. 

These elites are smart and conniving but prone to a particular kind of self-deception. They imagine that they are entangled in the plots of some mastermind who is even more sinister than they are. Dick’s most brilliant move is to reveal that the malign forces reshaping the world are in fact petty, self-obsessed and jealous beings. 

In Ubik, nearly everyone dies soon after the book’s opening. The bodies of the former employees of Runciter Associates are stored in cryogenic facilities that allow them to imagine a shared world into being. As they try to unravel the mystery of their death, the characters are devoured by a seemingly terrifying force. It turns out to be a rather disturbed adolescent demanding their attention. That may seem painfully familiar to Americans whose cable news and social media feeds are all Donald Trump, all the time.

A similar revelation anchors Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). The novel portrays Jason Taverner, a celebrity and member of an elite that is genetically enhanced for brains and beauty. He wakes up one day to a world in which no one knows who he is. Taverner was undone not by one of his peers but by a troubled fan who has consumed a drug that warps reality. In our world too, the feedback loops of fame have become increasingly deranged. It isn’t just pop stars but venture capitalists and CEOs whose sense of the real is inexorably chiselled away by the attentions of their adorers and execrators.

The fusion of business and hallucination reaches its peak in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), in which a business tycoon returns from the stars, promising to fulfil the wishes of everyone who steps into the fantasy worlds that he has created. Eldritch’s every move threatens to destabilise the existing corporate and political order. Those who use his product, a drug called Chew-Z, find themselves plunged into worlds that revolve around Eldritch, infecting them with his blurred vision, alienation and despair. Though Elon Musk has reportedly been (has been ?) a prolific drug user, he has not yet released his own variety of dope. 

In the 1960s and 1970s, the physicist Freeman Dyson speculated about megastructures that could encircle whole stars to capture their energy, before dismissing the idea as “a little joke”. Now such ideas inspire not just science-fiction novels but SpaceX’s business plans. Wild speculative fiction has become the fuel of wild financial speculation. Morgan Stanley projects that SpaceX’s revenue could reach $3.4tn by 2040, presumably the year that these particular stock analysts expect to retire.

Grand visions of technological transformation are everywhere, and everywhere they hide realities that combine extraordinary moneymaking schemes with bizarre beliefs. On the one hand, Marc Andreessen’s venture capital partnership funds gambling apps and a start-up promising to “cheat on everything”; on the other, the Silicon Valley Trump whisperer promises that our descendants will “live in the stars”, writing his own quasi-religious credo, complete with “patron saints”. Peter Thiel combines a superb record of picking tech winners with an obsession with the eschaton; he has brought his gloomy discourses on the nature of the Antichrist to the doorstep of the Vatican. Sam Altman says that thanks to AI, we “are close to creating a genie that can grant any wish”.

Yet it is perhaps Mark Zuckerberg who is trying hardest to build a universe that Dick invented as a cautionary tale. The chief executive of Meta is working on an AI version of himself that can interact with employees, maybe so he won’t have to. Zuckerberg’s exhortations, however, have so far failed to win over Meta employees asked to allow all of their clicks to be recorded so that they can train their own AI replacements. 

All of these are Dickish characters. We live in a future that he would recognise immediately. Billionaires have dreamt up alternative realities that they try to pull everyone into, constructing homegrown myths of religions from apocrypha. We are building AI that seems so close to human as to even confuse its creators, while it often fails at basic human tasks. The political order is trying to co-opt the rising business elites — or is it the other way around? 

Dick’s political bugaboo of Richard Nixon may be farcically reincarnated as Donald Trump. The historian Gary Wills described Nixon’s personal tragedy of talent and resentment in his 1970 book Nixon Agonistes. Trump’s dark promises to restore order are not nearly as psychologically interesting, but they have been much more consequential in practice. Like Arnie Kott, the corrupt and venal union leader in Martian Time-Slip (1964), Trump has tried to turn back time and failed. The rest of us are trapped with Trump in his pretend universe where he won the election in 2020, while government policy falls into dank memes and decay. Instead of being made great again, America has become poorer, weaker and meaner. Our fate might have more dignity if Trump were less petty than he is.

Back in 1976, Ursula K Le Guin compared Dick to a “homegrown Borges”, whose subject matter was “reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation”. He would be better recognised had he not been trapped in self-created theological and existential labyrinths after suffering his breakdown in the 1970s.

We live once more in an era that doesn’t make sense, however hard we look for some grand order. Dick’s combination of verve and madness in confronting the problems of the 1960s — Vietnam, suburbia, the cold war, drugs — holds three key lessons for today. 

We need to find our way back to reality: in Dick’s description, that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away

Second, technology can still be an ally for human ends. Dick’s androids are not necessarily antagonistic towards their human progenitors. In Vulcan’s Hammer (1960), the novel’s equivalent of GPT-7 achieves sentient consciousness and decides to work with humanity in order to prevent the emergence of GPT-8. Dick’s aliens (his technological visions in another guise) tend to be friendly towards humanity; if they pose any threat, it is towards humanity’s political oppressors. Technology might be glitchy and churlish in Dick’s world. It also has a purposiveness that sometimes fits surprisingly well with people’s own purposes.

Third, and most importantly, these purposes should be built from the bottom up. We are confused by and entangled in the science-fiction futures that tech elites have dreamt up for us, demanding that we assent to their strange beliefs about humanity’s destiny amid the stars, the coming of the eschaton, the birth of conscious artificial intelligence, perhaps all at once. More traditional elites, with their self-serving nostalgia for a past world that was never as solid as they believed, aren’t any better as guides. 

We need to find our way back to reality: in Dick’s description, that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. Dick’s last novel describes his own madness from the outside through the eyes of Angel Archer, the one sympathetic and deeply rendered woman in all his work. She concludes that the only way out is through holding on to what is solid, and building up from small relationships.

Salvation is found in the ridiculous and the small — in Ubik, God takes the form of a spray can. It is also to be found in the people around us. Le Guin says that Dick is like Dickens in treating the “honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people” as the bedrock of the world. The disturbed child in Martian Time-Slip begins to grow out of his madness when an aboriginal Martian brings him into communion by passing him a cigarette.

Much of what we used to believe in has gone away. Much of what obsesses us now might go away if only we stopped believing in it. The hypnotic powers of Trump and Musk are often a phantasm, losing their pull if people decline to be entranced. 

Instead of gazing upwards to find our glorious cosmic destiny, we should be looking closer to home. What are the people around us doing to build things up, brick layered and mortared carefully on brick? How can we make solid connections between the communities we live in and the bigger structures of the world? How can technology be put to work for human ends, rather than becoming an end in itself? Those are the kinds of questions that helped guide Dick out of his madness. They can help guide us out of ours, too.

Henry Farrell is a professor at Johns Hopkins University, external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute and the co-author with Abraham Newman of ‘Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy’. Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of ‘Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future’

It kicked off the USrael remake of the ME/NA. I’ve not changed my mind all these years later. Because there has been no new information that would have caused me to change my mind. And everything that followed after the attack makes very clear the false flag benefited the US and Israel- Cui Bono? The beneficiaries are the perpetrators- The US and Israel have been the biggest beneficiaries for 25 years

And that’s about all I can say.

France24.com

Iran and the US on Wednesday traded their biggest wave of attacks on shipping since the war began, with Iran saying it struck 10 vessels near the Strait of Hormuz after US forces sank five Iranian oil tankers. Brent crude oil surged above $100 a barrel as fears grew over global energy supplies.

Iran said on Wednesday it had attacked 10 ships near the Strait of Hormuz after the US sank five Iranian oil tankers, in the biggest declared wave of tit-for-tat attacks on shipping by both sides since the start of the six-month-old war.

The attacks sent the price of oil surging, with benchmark Brent crude futures breaching $100 a barrel for the first time since July. At least one seafarer aboard a tanker was reported killed and another listed as missing.

Iran also said it had fired ballistic missiles at a base used by US forces in Jordan. Attacks by both sides since the end of August have shattered a month of relative calm, with the US and Iran hitting military, shipping and energy assets.

The Revolutionary Guards said they would sharply escalate their response to any further attacks, hitting 20 targets if the enemy struck two or three. Iran would soon release maps of a new, enlarged off-limits zone at sea that would extend as far as Chabahar on the far reaches of Iran’s coast near Pakistan, the Guards said.

Recent days have also seen an escalation in fighting between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis in Yemen, a second theatre of war that threatens global energy supplies from the Middle East.

Iranian tankers ablaze

The Americans said they destroyed five Iranian oil tankers overnight, releasing video of ships ablaze before they sank.

The US military’s Central Command called its attacks a response to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeting a US Navy warship twice with ballistic missiles over the previous two days. No Americans were harmed, the US said.

Washington has announced a new policy of attacking Iranian tankers in retaliation for fire that threatens its warships, and says it has hit 10 so far over the past week.

“Iran continues to try to hit US naval ships, and for every time they do that or try to do that, they’re going to lose tankers,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters during a visit to Colombia.

Iran said it fired on two US ships and eight tankers in response.

One seafarer was killed aboard the oil products tanker Hercules Star while at anchorage off Dubai and another crew member was missing, the vessel’s charterer, Peninsula, said. Maritime security sources said it may have been hit by a drone.

The British maritime security agency UKMTO described a vessel in the vicinity that was listing, possibly taking on water after being struck by a projectile. Reuters could not immediately determine whether this referred to the same ship.

Two Iraqi port officials said a tanker carrying 2 million barrels of fuel oil, the New Andros, had caught fire after being struck by a drone in Iraqi waters. There were no reports of casualties among the 22 crew.

The UKMTO said it had received reports of several merchant ships struck by disabling fire in the northern Gulf and Gulf of Oman, on either side of the strait.

Iran also threatened oil tankers in Kuwaiti and Bahraini ports, according to a statement carried by state media. A maritime security source reported a liquefied natural gas tanker was damaged in the Emirati port of Khor Fakkan.

Iran launches largest attack in five months as US interceptors run low

Iran has launched its largest missile salvo in five months as the conflict with the U.S. continues. The barrage comes amid growing concerns over America’s stockpile of critical missile interceptors, after a CNN report in August revealed that U.S. forces were rapidly depleting key air-defense systems.

Mokhber: US unmanned submarine could boost Iran’s autonomous systems
[Wed, 09 Sep 2026 23:03:15 +0300]

Iran captured an unmanned sub/drone the US was using for de- mining

Tehran – Saba:Mohammad Mokhber, adviser to Iran’s Leader, said Wednesday that the capture of an advanced US unmanned submarine by the IRGC Navy could spur a breakthrough in Iran’s autonomous systems.

According to Fars News Agency, Mokhber said Iran’s defense experts could turn the captured technology into strategic achievements, as they did with the US RQ-170 drone.

He said the submarine could provide a new opportunity to advance Iran’s autonomous systems.

Oil climbs past 100.00 a barrel

The global price of oil topped $100 a barrel on Wednesday for the first time since July, as continued tensions between Iran and the United States added to uncertainty over future supply.

Refresh your memory here

Central banks have sold Treasurys for weeks since the conflict began

The virtuous loop that has seen America underwrite stability in the Middle East in exchange for Gulf states recycling their dollar revenues into U.S. Treasurys has been broken.

The understanding traces back to 1974, when Henry Kissinger struck one of the most consequential financial deals in modern history. Saudi Arabia would price its oil in dollars and park the surpluses in U.S. assets — Treasurys above all. Other Gulf states followed. In exchange, America provided security guarantees and a stable global order.

The arrangement was elegant in its circularity: Oil consumers paid dollars for energy, those dollars flowed to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi and from there back into Washington’s debt. For 50 years, this petrodollar loop quietly subsidized American borrowing costs and cemented the greenback’s role as the world’s reserve currency.

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has fractured this arrangement — at both ends.

**Start with the importing side. Following the strike on Iran on Feb. 28, foreign central banks were net sellers of Treasurys for consecutive weeks. Holdings at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York dropped by roughly $82 billion recently to $2.7 trillion, which was the lowest level since 2012.

The 10-year Treasury yield, rather than falling on safe-haven demand as it has in every major recent crisis, climbed from 3.9% at the end of February to above 4.4% within weeks. The rates desk at Bank of America offered a dry summary: “Foreign official sectors are selling U.S. Treasury bonds.”

The mechanism is straightforward. Turkey, India, Thailand and other oil-importing nations are caught in a brutal arithmetic: Oil priced in dollars surged past $100 a barrel at one point while their currencies weakened against the greenback. To limit depreciation — which would push domestic oil prices even higher, forcing either fiscal subsidies or household pain — central banks intervene in currency markets. That requires dollars. The most liquid dollar asset any central bank holds is Treasurys. So they sell.

This is not without precedent. Foreign central banks sold a record $109 billion in Treasurys during the COVID-19 panic of March 2020. But that episode resolved quickly. The Fed deployed dollar swap lines, calm returned and the money flowed back within weeks. The flight-to-quality instinct was temporarily scrambled but structurally intact.

***Now consider the exporting side — and why the Iran war is categorically different from all those episodes.

In a normal oil shock, rising prices generate rising revenues for Gulf producers. Petrodollars flow back into dollar-denominated assets, including Treasurys. High oil prices have historically been, paradoxically, supportive of the Treasury market. The shock creates the surplus that generates demand for the bonds.

This time, Gulf producers can’t get their oil out. The Strait of Hormuz closure has stranded their barrels along with everyone else’s.

Gulf states including Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the UAE collectively cut production by at least 10 million barrels per day in March. Saudi Arabia and the UAE can export reduced volumes through alternative pipelines. But those routes handle only about a quarter of normal Strait throughput at full capacity and they are under active Iranian drone and missile threat. Qatar declared force majeure on exports of liquefied natural gas after strikes on its Ras Laffan facility. The Gulf Cooperation Council’s economic model — export hydrocarbons, recycle into global assets — has effectively seized up.

The petrodollar loop requires two moving parts: dollars earned and dollars invested. Both have stopped.

The numbers on the exporting side make this concrete. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE had a combined holding of about $300 billion in Treasurys as of January. These countries are now simultaneously earning less oil revenue, spending heavily on air defense and reviewing the investment pledges they made to Washington just months ago.

A Gulf official told the Financial Times that several of the region’s largest economies are examining whether force majeure clauses apply to existing investment commitments, including to the U.S. Gulf sovereign wealth funds, which are big investors in U.S. assets. The direction of travel is now uncertain in a way it has not been in decades.

There is a longer structural story that the war is accelerating rather than creating. The share of Treasurys held by foreign investors had already fallen to around 32%, down from half in the early 2010s. Central banks became net sellers in early 2025. For the first time since 1996, global central banks now hold more gold in aggregate than U.S. government bonds. These were slow-moving trends, easy to dismiss as noise. The Iran war is making them look like signal.

The standard reassurance is that there is no alternative to Treasurys — no other market offers the depth, liquidity and legal infrastructure that central banks require. This remains true. Foreign central banks will not abandon Treasurys wholesale. But “no realistic alternative” and “unquestioned safe haven” are not the same thing — and the Iran war is clarifying the difference.

The flight-to-quality trade has always rested on a political premise: That in a global crisis, the United States is a stabilizer or bystander, not a combatant. But the calculus changes when the U.S. itself is the belligerent; when the conflict is partly America’s war, driving the oil shock, straining Gulf relationships and generating the fiscal pressure that has bond investors worried about U.S. budget deficits. Not completely. Not permanently. But enough.

Kissinger’s 1974 deal held through the Cold War, the Gulf Wars, the financial crisis and a pandemic. It has not survived this. The petrodollar loop was always a political arrangement dressed in financial clothing. Now that the politics have changed, the finance is following.

More on the US treasury buying up double the bonds it normally does

The U.S. Treasury is planning to buy back at least double the long-dated government bonds it usually does. Will the plan pit the Treasury secretary against both the bond markets and the Fed?

Next week, the U.S. Treasury plans to buy back at least double the number of 10-, 20- and 30-year government bonds it normally does. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says it’s to help markets run smoothly, but many investors are skeptical.

MA: Those are some of the reasons yields on Treasurys are high at the moment. The 30-year is at over 5%. This is a problem for the administration because the government’s debt just hit $40 trillion. The U.S. has a huge pile of debt, and high yields on Treasurys means higher borrowing costs.

WONG: High yields can also be a problem for you and me and really anyone who wants to borrow money. Because Treasurys are considered risk-free, their yields are the base for other interest rates in the economy. Take the 30-year mortgage. The interest rate for that is based on the 10-year Treasury.

MA: So these high yields pose a dilemma for Scott Bessent. What’s the Treasury secretary to do?

WONG: Well, now it is time to talk about this plan that the Treasury Department unveiled. Starting next week, it plans to at least double the size of its buyback program for longer-dated U.S. government bonds. When the Treasury Department buys back, say, 20- and 30-year bonds, it’s basically acting as an eager customer. It pumps up demand for these bonds, and that causes prices to go up and yields to come down.

MA: The problem with the Treasury Department’s plan is that Scott Bessent is not talking about lowering yields. He told CNBC that his department is doing this to improve liquidity for longer-dated bonds.

WONG: Right. So nothing to do with lowering yields and interest rates.

MA: That is what the Treasury secretary is saying. But the market’s chilly, even hostile, reaction to this buyback announcement, could be a signal that they’re not buying it.

Lastly

Saudi Aramco oil facilities hit in new strikes

Saudi Aramco’s oil facilities in the Saudi Arabian city of Jizan have been attacked only a month after a separate strike temporarily knocked out some production at its refinery.

The company’s oil infrastructure was hit on Monday and the damage was being assessed, said two people with knowledge of the matter.

Jizan is the kingdom’s closest industrial city to the Yemeni border and has been attacked by the Houthis on several occasions in the past.

Jizan is home to a 400,000-barrel-per-day oil refinery, which is among the country’s largest, along with associated plants and energy infrastructure.

Saudi Aramco’s chief executive Amin Nasser said last month that the attacks had caused some interruptions to the company’s oil production but that this had no material operational or financial impact.

The latest attack was similar in scale to last month’s strike, said one of the people.

Saudi Aramco did not immediately respond to a request for information.

Oil prices climbed on Monday, with Brent crude up 1.2 per cent at $97.40 a barrel.

More refined oil products than usual were shipped from Jizan in the first few months of the US-Iran war as the conflict crimped Saudi exports from the Gulf, but volumes dropped dramatically after the Houthis restarted their attacks. No oil products were shipped from Jizan in August, according to data compiled by Kpler.

“We are back to full-time war in Yemen,” said Farea al-Muslimi, a research fellow at Chatham House. “It’s on land, in the air and on the sea . . . The Saudis are doing everything possible to avoid a direct confrontation, but they are preparing for it.”

More problems on the supply side… means more problems for the petro dollar and US Treasury Bonds