Quote Originally Posted by mamboni View Post
It's their trump card. And we are forcing them to play it. IMHO, NATO will have no choice but to attempth to prevent Iran from closng the straits because western economies cannot stand the stress of an oil price shock. NATO will view Iran's "exercise" as an act of war.
Mamboni,
I'm of the opinion that "the straits of Hormuz threat" and the "30% of all oil goes through there" are attached at the hip.

Truth is, and has been exposed earlier here and elsewhere, that less than 10% of the world's oil moves thru SoH.

Mostly the oil comes out of European ports and flows E and South...

SoH for all practical purposes is yesterday's news. They can practice all they want, but if they expect to really use Oil as a threat card, they better get back to blowing up pipelines. WAAAAAAAAY more effective.

Kind of hard to blockade a basically unused FORMER oil chokepoint.

I'm thinking Tyler jumped the gun here, and a $2 move higher in oil as the result of this saber rattlin', ho-hum event is no big "explosion" higher. Kind of surprised at that, since I like reading Zero.

Now if it would have gone $96 to $250 in one gigantic thrust upwards, I'd be impressed. That not being the case, all this $2.20 ho-hum spike is reactive short covering by the floor traders on the NYMEX! Besides, Gold went down $10 high to low this AM...that's not a telegraph of a scared world market place.

At the moment, the Iranian towel heads just got their turban twisted for the most part.


beefsteak