🚨🇮🇷🇺🇸 Britain's shipping watchdog says ships hit in Hormuz are refusing to report it, and traffic is still 70% below prewar levels UKMTO logged 12 attacks in its latest week, 10 inside the strait, with one ship lost and two left dead in the water. Then it admitted the number is wrong: most vessels that get hit aren't calling it in, and reports from other channels can't be verified. In three cases nobody even knows what happened to the ship. Owners have a reason to stay quiet. A reported attack means an insurance claim, a war-risk premium hike, and a vessel flagged in every broker's database, so captains take the hit and keep sailing. The number that cuts through both sides' claims is the 70%. CENTCOM says it controls the strait and Iran says it's closed, and UKMTO says it can't verify the American escort figures either. The truth sits in the traffic count: seven months in, seven out of ten ships that used to transit Hormuz still don't, and the ones that do are getting hit at a rate nobody can fully see. Source: UK Maritime Trade Operations / Writer: Daniel

🇮🇷 I knew the oil market was getting distorted by the war. But I didn’t realize it had reached this point. Hiring a supertanker to move oil from the Persian Gulf to Asia is now approaching $1.4 million a day! That is more than a 1,000% increase in a year, and the chart makes the scale of it almost absurd. Even the enormous tanker-rate spike during the chaos of 2020 barely registers beside what is happening now. We spend so much time watching the price of the oil itself that I think we sometimes miss the other half of the equation. Having oil is one thing. Getting it to where the world needs it is becoming EXTRAORDINARILY expensive. Writer: Oliver