Ten million barrels a day now leave Hormuz through a lane the US Navy defends

The premium a cargo owner pays to cross Hormuz buys one thing, an option on closure, and the underlying of that option is less Iranian intent than Iranian eyesight. Two weeks of American bombing last month degraded Tehran's radar and maritime surveillance to the point where tankers now run the strait at night with transponders off, shuttle out, and hand cargo to other tankers that carry it to customers ^[14]. Enforcement on the other side has gone administrative: of the 87 vessel interactions Central Command tallied, 82 were redirections against three disablings and two boardings, which is 94% of the file settled by radio ^[22].

Set the defended lane against the whole basket. Goldman Sachs has total crude and product exports out of the region at 15 million to 16 million barrels a day ^[10], which puts the corridor's roughly 10 million at between 62% and 67% of everything leaving ^[20]. Kpler's read, Gulf flows at about 70% of pre-war levels ^[11], implies a normal somewhere near 21 million to 23 million barrels a day and 6.4 million to 6.9 million barrels still absent each day ^[21]. The two houses are not counting identical cargoes, so treat the missing volume as directional rather than audited, but it is the honest form of the risk premium, paid in barrels that did not sail rather than in insurance quotes.

The macro is the part Tehran cannot escort around. The IMF in April had the economy shrinking 6.1% this year, the worst contraction in decades ^[4], and a labour ministry official put job losses above one million by late May ^[5]. Iran is still attacking ships and the attacks are not stopping traffic ^[15], which is the expensive kind of failure, because each sortie spends degraded surveillance and finite munitions on a lane that keeps getting cleared.

This is probably wrong in one specific way. Or rather, the more interesting version of the thesis is that the Hormuz premium was never a price on Iranian capability at all but a price on whether somebody else would escort, in which case what has changed is a deployment schedule, and Central Command's completed clearance of mines from the international routes last week ^[9] is a maintenance task rather than a settlement. If the escort thins, the same water reprices within a session; if Iran lands one mining that halts traffic for a week, the option holders are vindicated at a price they will enjoy. The dull path is flows grinding back toward normal while the premium bleeds away and transponder-off shuttle runs become ordinary freight. I lean to the dull one, and I would drop it the day Kpler's 70% prints below 50.