Luke Vargas

I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

Oil prices have crossed $100 a barrel for the first time since Russia's invasion of Ukraine rattled oil markets in 2022.

The journal's Joe Wallace has been tracking the war with Iran's impact on oil markets.

He joins us now with the latest.

Joe, I guess we can say it now.

It has been a history-making week for oil markets.

U.S.

futures registering their biggest weekly rise ever.

We've got Brent and West Texas Intermediate Crude having both spiked today to almost $120 a barrel, though they have settled down a little bit from there.

Just walk us through the movement we're seeing in energy markets and why, as you and your colleagues reported over the weekend, all of this amounts to the Persian Gulf oil squeeze that many people had long been fearing.

You've reported that the straits are not technically closed, but you only need to look at the number of ships in the Gulf waiting to pass through to kind of get a read on effectively what the situation is.

And on top of that, there is a fear, a growing fear, it seems well-founded, that disruptions to infrastructure are going to continue.

This is something that our correspondent Thomas Grove has been watching, and he filed this update for us.

Joe, I know you're not a water supply expert, but obviously Tom is painting a good picture there of why that's obviously a really...

critical concern for these countries.

But over on the oil side, what we've seen must just have every country that possesses energy infrastructure worried that they're next and traders fearing the same.

Not hard to see then why traders are so nervy about where this is going to leave prices, not just, you know, sort of in the coming weeks and months.

I mean, what is the oil price outlook as you're hearing it from traders?

And of course, it's not just the prices directly, what people are paying at the pump, but all sorts of other ramifications here to inflation, to other commodities prices.

There's a lot to watch.