Brent crude fell one percent on Tuesday to settle at $99.25 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate shed 1.2 percent to $94.59. It was the fifth consecutive session of losses for both, leaving prices down more than four percent on the week and still up more than nine percent on the month.
What moved them was a sentence.
In his address to the United Nations General Assembly, Donald Trump said he has a big decision to make on whether to seek a negotiated deal with Iran or annihilate the Islamic Republic. Then: I believe we’ll make a deal right after the election because it doesn’t make sense for them not to. They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election. What they don’t realize is that I’m not running.
Later, meeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he said his team had just concluded a very good three-hour meeting with Iran’s representatives, with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner as the envoys. Prices fell again on that.
Two other things pushed the same way. Reports that Iran had offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within days if Washington eased pressure, which Iran’s semi-official Fars agency knocked down and NBC has not confirmed. And reports that Saudi Arabia plans to restart its East-West pipeline as early as this week.
Trump also said American forces have recently escorted more than a billion barrels through the strait, and that more oil is flowing under military protection than at any previous point of the war. Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is at the General Assembly, and Trump told Fox on Sunday he was open to meeting him.
Now look at what the market actually did with all that.
It moved a global input price on the reported atmosphere of a meeting whose contents nobody has disclosed, and on a politician’s estimate of when a war might end, which is itself pinned to an election date. Not a ceasefire. Not a signed document. A mood, a calendar and a denial.
Every operator has been on the wrong end of this and the lesson is about decision-making rather than oil.
Your supplier mentions, in passing, that they are in conversations with a new shipping partner and things should improve soon. You hear soon and you make a decision with it. You hold off on the price rise, you take the larger order, you commit to the account you were going to decline. Nothing has been agreed by anybody. What you have done is convert somebody’s optimism into your own exposure.
The discipline is not cynicism. It is separating what has happened from what has been said about what might happen, and only spending against the first. A three-hour meeting is a fact. A deal is not.
There is also a detail in Trump’s own framing worth holding onto: the market heard a date, and the date was after 3 November. Which is to say the good news was an admission that nothing changes for six weeks.
The barrel came down five days in a row on a maybe.
Source: CNBC, “Oil prices fall for fifth day after Trump says U.S. met with Iran for three hours”
