Michael Janda

And it had been a very positive week last week on hopes that these peace talks would generate some form of agreement or at least a continued ceasefire.

You'd think the destruction of that with this new announcement about the US blockade would have seen, I mean, it did see oil prices up 8%, but we're seeing Australia down about half a percent in the morning trade.

Even Tokyo, which has been quite volatile in response to changes in the oil market.

From the Middle East.

That was only down about 0.6%, 0.7%, 0.8% in very early trade there.

So the market perhaps is taking the view that Donald Trump does keep backing down and this time they're not going to be sucked in and they're just going to wait it out and see what happens.

But as I said, if it does all blow up, things could change very quickly because, you know...

What markets had been betting on is a short closure of the straight and then a return to energy normalcy within weeks, maybe months.

The longer this goes on, we're seeing refineries running out of oil.

They've chewed through their existing stockpiles.

We are actually going to see the fuel shortages start hitting economies in the next three, four, five weeks.

That's what all the experts are predicting.

then the global economy becomes a major issue.

It's not just the price, then you actually start running short of fuels that you need to keep things running.

And that has been the constant taco bet that as soon as the economic pain becomes too much, particularly in the US domestically, with the midterms coming up at the end of the year, that Donald Trump will back down.

I guess the fear that

everyone either has or should have is that at some point maybe he won't and then what do you do because the sell-off is going to be particularly brutal on that occasion when he doesn't taco one of the other things we need to be watching this week in the united states in washington dc twice a year

The problem is you're talking about the adults gathering in the room and this US blockade announcement sounds like something my six-year-old does when I say to her, if you do this, you

It certainly has echoes of those kind of behaviours where you don't think through the consequences.

You throw away my toy because I've thrown it at the wall, then I'm going to throw away something you own.