US treasury secretary abruptly told to leave interview by Trump; returns shaken

The Iranian retaliation and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have pushed the oil prices to soar globally. Even Donald Trump and his administration are under immense pressure. This was seen on Friday when a senior cabinet colleague of Donald Trump was pulled away from a LIVE interview by the US President. When he returned, he could barely speak. This, Rifat Jawaid argues, shows the stress that the recent losses of US service personnel and the overall impact by the Iranian response have caused to the Trump administration.

Trump bombed Khargh island, claiming they didn't hit any oil infrastructure. So what did they target?
The tourist destinations, hotels, school, church? Airport and harbor I guess. That's where China loads its shadow tankers I bet. But Iran warned about hitting their oil infrastructure, which the harbor is part of I assume. What's next...



And wow Hegseth meltdown in front of the press.

Well, there will be military infrastructure on the island. It's a super important island after all. You can also see as example bunkers when you zoom into it and there probably is/was air defense or stuff like radar installations. Could be places where they build small boats, could have some water mines stored somewhere and so on...

This war is stupid but we also don't have to act as if there is nothing just because Google doesn't have a sign telling us "this is military installation XY"...

Oh there will be police presence at the least on the island. 

It's that US/Israel don't have a great track record not causing collateral damage. And this war is partly fought by optics, Iran can easily spin this as attacking their oil infrastructure, which they warned about, and justify retaliatory strikes on / near oil infrastructure with US interests.

It's just stupid to keep escalating. The regime isn't going to fall even with Khargh island completed obliterated. It's risk vs reward, huge risk, little reward.

Iran threatens United Arab Emirate's ports and docks

Some oil-loading operations have been suspended in the United Arab Emirates' Fujairah emirate, ​a major ‌bunkering hub and crude export terminal, after a drone attack and fire ⁠on Saturday, industry and trade sources said. The suspension comes hours after the US attacked military targets on Iran's Kharg Island oil export terminal ‌and Iran's Revolutionary Guards responded by saying that US interests in the UAE - including ports, ⁠docks and military locations - were legitimate targets. Details by Hoda Adbel-Hamid, journalist in Doha.

Was it worth that? Likely the only gain by striking Khargh island was to temporarily disrupt loading China's shadow fleet.

Did you already forget Iraq, how many weapons of mass destruction did we find there?

The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Get ready for $8 a gallon of gas in the USA! Also a serious potential for WW3. FML.

Not sure what this has to do with what I said. There's war and without even arguing if it's justified or not it's not surprising that USA will destroy bunkers, air defense systems, water mine storages, radar systems and stuff like that 

Didn't you even manage to reach to the part of my post saying "this war is stupid",?

Yep and the longer the closure continues, the longer it will take to get production back up to normal. It takes a lot of time to get the oil wells and refineries up to speed again, which are now being closed down and capped off since the oil can't move anymore and storage depots are full.

Trump & Co keep saying it will only be temporary while releasing 400 billion barrels of oil to temporarily relief the worst effects. Yet with 20-21 million barrels coming out of Hormuz daily, that can only cover 20 days of loss from Hormuz. 

'Cascading effects' of Strait of Hormuz blockage getting worse by the day, energy and trade experts say

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/armstrong-iran-trump-supply-chains-strait-hormuz-us-israel-9.7126304

Energy and trade experts are warning of a cascading impact on global supply chains that will only grow as the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran drags on and the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked.

Much of the focus right now is, rightly, on oil markets. Over the 12 days of the conflict so far, the effective closure of the strait has blocked around 250 million barrels of oil from leaving the Persian Gulf and being sent around the world.

That's driven up fuel prices everywhere. But much more than oil is being held back.

The world should be bracing for a disruption to the supply of critical metals like copper, nickel and cobalt coming from the Gulf, said Jim Krane, the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow for Energy Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas.  Nearly half of the global supply of urea, one of the most commonly used fertilizers, also comes from the region.

"It's a critical node in the global economy and the loss of access to that single strait is just causing cascading effects across the global economy," Krane said.

One key aluminum producer in Bahrain has already declared force majeure — freeing it from its contractual obligations — and suspended its deliveries. Meanwhile, Qatar, the second largest exporter of liquified natural gas, announced this week it was halting production at its facilities and told clients it was unable to complete deliveries.

Effects will 'take months to unwind': Carlyle Group CEO

Even if the Strait of Hormuz was completely opened today, it would take months before any of these issues are resolved.

"You've disrupted global supply chains. This is not just a disruption to oil — it's gas, it's fertilizer, it's metals, it's petrochemicals. The list goes on and on," Jeff Currie, CEO of investment firm Carlyle Group, told Bloomberg this week.

"The ships are in the wrong places, insurances are being cancelled. The damage is going to take months to unwind."

How about RAM prices...

On the other side of the continent, Reuters has reported that chip makers in South Korea have warned the conflict could disrupt the production of semiconductors.

"Officials raised ​a possibility that semiconductor production could be disrupted if some of these key materials cannot ⁠be sourced from the Middle East," said Kim Young-bae of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, naming helium as one example.

South Korea's chip industry supplies more than 30 per cent of the global total. Qatar is one of only a handful of countries that produces helium — which is used to cool equipment during production— for export.

Poorer countries could face shortages

In the short term, the oil and gas shortage has driven up costs. But many experts say these higher costs have not fully priced in what happens if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for even a matter of weeks.

Tankers that left the Gulf before the conflict began are still at sea, heading to their destinations. But analysts describe what's happening as something akin to an "air bubble" in a hose.

"Every day the global oil market gets 15+ million barrels tighter. We've already lost more than a quarter billion barrels of oil supply, thus far, in the Strait of Hormuz stoppage — that's not a sustainable pace, and no U.S. president will tolerate for long the price spikes that are bound to follow," wrote energy analyst Rory Johnston in his Commodity Context newsletter on Substack.

He says ongoing disruption will continue to drive prices higher in wealthy nations and lead to outright shortages in poorer countries.

"We're seeing shortages already pretty acute in Pakistan and Bangladesh. That's probably going to lead to some power outages … and other countries will start seeing that soon," he said on Thursday.

The international push for a co-ordinated release of oil reserves will help. But it can only do so much.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has said it will take about 120 days for the American reserves to be deployed. That would mean about 1.4 million barrels per day to address a hole of about 250 million barrels that's growing by the day.

"Fundamentally, the normal flow of traffic through the strait must resume or the oil market will break the global economy," Johnston wrote on Thursday.

The biggest problem right now is no one knows for certain what specifically needs to happen for the war to end. Until it does, every hour and every day comes with new risk that the war will expand and make all of these supply-chain challenges worse.

Yeah, our only hope is that we somehow make it to the USA midterm elections and Trump and Co lose spectacularly.  Like Republicans lose EVERY single contested seat in the Senate, even the ones that normally have a 1:100 chance of the Republican Incumbent losing. Because if we don't make it that far or if my fellow Americans prove to be as stupid as I think they are, we are looking at the collapse of the global economy, the collapse of the dollar, and WW3. Hell, even AIPAC Democrats would have to lose horribly to random 3rd party candidates. I'm talking about political change that is bigger than what happened in the 1930's in the USA. 

Why would we need such a drastic sweeping election to save the USA and the world from disaster? Because a procedural tactic in the Senate called the filibuster makes it where you need 60 votes to get anything done in Congress. It's also what is needed to impeach and remove a president. But Democrats and 3rd party candidates are at a horrible disadvantage in the Senate due to the fact that it's an undemocratic dinosaur of an institution. Senate districts are already horribly gerrymandered (AKA rigged) and rural states naturally get 7 times as many Senators per population as populous states. Then the filibuster comes into play, which makes it so that 40 Senators representing a tiny sliver of the American voting public can block any bill. They do this by just talking forever. You can't vote until someone is done "debating" and "debating" includes reading from the phone book. Unless of course you vote to end debate, which is called a vote of cloture, but that takes 60 votes. So without sweeping electoral change getting anything done in the USA is impossible. 

We
Are
So
Fucked!

Brendan Carr from FCC telling US TV channels to report about the Iran war as Trump wants it to be or they will lose their license. Obviously calling everything else "fake news" as argument but we all know that Russia and Putin are just such a great example for them.

How long until they will openly talk about censoring the internet? Or until they will beat every demonstrator to the ground but nobody will be allowed to mention it because it would be only fake news? 

And then? People falling out of the window or just disappear? Not there yet but can't take too long anymore.