Oil touched a one-week high on Tuesday, August 11, and Wall Street closed lower. Traders had grown gloomier about any deal to calm the Middle East and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Reuters reported.
Iran made no softer noises. The newly appointed secretary of its Supreme National Security Council said the strait would stay closed as long as the United States did not change its behavior and accept Iran’s conditions to end the war.
The day before, President Donald Trump had answered Iran’s conditions for a deal with a demand of his own: that Iran pay compensation for people killed in wars, attacks and protests. That could make reopening the waterway harder. Oil jumped 5% on Monday on the back and forth. On Tuesday, Brent futures rose $1.19, or 1.4%, to settle at $88.91 a barrel, and U.S. crude gained $1.07, or 1.3%, to finish at $83.20.
“This is going to be almost a war of attrition now,” said Tony Sycamore, a market analyst at IG. He said he could see oil trading in a $75 to $95 range “while we wait to see who blinks first.”
Stocks give back gains
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.34% to 53,791.85. The S&P 500 lost 0.32% to 7,728.20, and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 0.60% to 26,445.45, about 2% below its record close in early June. Amazon and Alphabet both fell. MSCI’s world equity gauge slipped 0.23%. The pan-European STOXX 600 was flat at 660.51, close to all-time highs, while emerging market stocks fell 0.28%.
Inflation worried investors too. The U.S. July consumer price report was due Wednesday. It would not capture the latest jump in energy costs, but money markets showed a 50-50 chance of a Federal Reserve rate hike in September, and the data could shape that bet. Jonas Goltermann, chief markets economist at Capital Economics, said the risks were skewed toward a hot print, which could bring renewed stagflation worries. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note slipped to 4.695%.
Gold retreated from a two-month high, with spot gold down 0.45% at $4,368.61 an ounce. The yen stayed below last week’s high of 155.20 against the dollar after several suspected rounds of intervention, including a joint move by Japan and the United States.
Away from the geopolitics, Nvidia said it had teamed up with six major financial institutions, among them BlackRock, Apollo and Goldman Sachs, on funding measures worth more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure. It gave few details on terms or commitments. Intel raised $20 billion in a share sale, its first stock offering since it listed in 1971.
Sources
- Oil drifts lower as traders weigh supply risks amid US–Iran tensions | Dunya News
- Oil Prices Climb Amid US-Iran Tensions; Stocks Retreat Globally
