US Treasury Secretary says we may see an agreement today or tomorrow that will open the Strait of Hormuz for 30 to 60 days, and then energy prices will decrease, Al Jazeera reports

US Treasury Secretary says we may see an agreement today or tomorrow that will open the Strait of Hormuz for 30 to 60 days, and then energy prices will decrease, Al Jazeera reports.

Hormuz headlines sit in a well-worn category: roughly a fifth of seaborne crude and a large share of LNG transits the strait, so any closure or reopening trades through the front of the oil curve, freight and war-risk insurance premia, and refining spreads rather than through flat price alone. The pattern in past episodes of threatened closure followed by negotiated reopening has been a sharp unwind of the geopolitical risk premium in prompt crude and a flattening of the backwardation that builds during disruption, with products and tanker rates often lagging the crude move. The specific mechanism here is time-limited: a 30 to 60 day window is a truce, not a resolution, so the curve response has historically been concentrated in the nearby spreads while longer-dated prices keep some premium for re-escalation risk. The sourcing matters too: comments attributed to a Treasury Secretary on energy market access, carried via a regional broadcaster, are the kind of headline that has previously been walked back or qualified within hours, and confirmation from the counterparties and from shipping or insurance channels is the usual tell that a reopening is real. Worth watching are official confirmation, the treatment of tanker traffic and insurance costs in the days after any agreement, and whether the expiry date of the window gets extended, since time-limited arrangements of this kind have a record of being rolled or collapsing at the deadline.