In The Biggest Oil Shock in History. Why Isn't the Price Higher?  we established that geopolitical oil shocks follow two distinct patterns. Before 1986, oil prices were administered by OPEC — when a shock struck, the cartel used it to permanently reprice oil upward, and the price never came back down. After 1986, when Saudi Arabia abandoned its role as swing price-setter and oil became freely traded, a different pattern emerged: the crude price spikes on fear, peaks within mo

When the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed in late February 2026, it shut off approximately 15 million barrels per day of crude oil. The IEA described it immediately as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. On a gross basis, that assessment is correct. Yet the oil price tells a more nuanced story. Despite the scale of the disruption, the price response has been more contained than the 1990 Kuwait invasion and far smaller than the 1973 Arab e

The 2026 Hormuz crisis is not solely a story of physical supply disruption. It is a story of deliberate policy choices by major powers, beginning with a US financial manoeuvre in Venezuela that stripped China of its energy insurance policy, followed by Washington's strikes on Iran that closed the Strait, compounded by Beijing's defensive response, and briefly extended by Washington's own contemplation of an export ban. The pattern is not accidental: the powers that control oi

For the past two years, gold miners have lived in a macroeconomic utopia. As highlighted in a previous article, Implications of the Gold to Oil Price Ratio , it was a period defined by a rare decoupling: as the price of gold ascended to historic heights, the cost of extracting it remained remarkably subdued. This divergence — the gold–oil spread — pushed sector margins to all-time highs and transformed gold equities from speculative plays into free cash flow machines. At the

The Strait of Hormuz has been described as the world's most critical energy artery, but in February 2026, that artery was effectively severed. As conflict between the US and Iran escalated, the closure of this passage didn't simply spike the price of oil — it broke the global supply chain for refined products in ways that have no modern parallel, not even the 2022 Ukraine crisis. 2022 vs 2026 The 2022 Ukraine energy crisis was severe, but its oil impact was one of trade redir

Precious metals like gold and silver are often viewed primarily as monetary assets, leading many investors to monitor the gold-to-silver ratio to gauge relative value. While silver is historically more volatile than gold, it is prone to aggressive rallies where it overshoots, as seen in 1998, 2011, and the recent surge over the last few months. Source: FactSet However, unlike gold, silver’s trajectory is also dictated by its heavy industrial footprint. In 2025, industrial use

The gold-to-oil price ratio is often viewed as a unique indicator of global economic conditions and market sentiment. It captures the ongoing ‘tug-of-war’ between gold as a safe-haven monetary asset and oil as a key industrial commodity. Historically, elevated gold–oil ratios have coincided with periods of economic stress, heightened uncertainty, and defensive investor positioning. Conversely, a low ratio tends to occur during periods of strong economic expansion, when energy

For decades, base metals such as copper, aluminium, nickel, zinc, and lead traded as a reflection of global growth. Prices typically moved in lockstep with industrial activity and were closely correlated with global growth proxies such as oil and iron ore. This relationship held remarkably well across multiple cycles, including China’s industrialisation, the post-GFC recovery, and the post-COVID rebound. But something changed in 2024. In my earlier work on an AI-driven commod

The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 was a defining moment in history. Within months, it accelerated a full-blown AI arms race and triggered an unprecedented concentration of capital expenditure into compute infrastructure. Over the past three years, major hyperscalers have announced plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in data centres, chips, networking and power systems. This scale of spending is now powerful enough to break decades-old relationships across glo

For fifteen years, the United States enjoyed the cheapest natural gas on the planet. Henry Hub gas prices averaged below $3/MMBtu for most of the 2010s and frequently traded under $2.50 for long stretches between 2016 and 2021. That abundance rewired America’s electricity system – natural gas use for electricity grew 25% since 2010 and now accounts for 43% of total US generation capacity.   That golden era is about to come to an end. Three powerful forces are colliding at the