Brent crude futures jumped a little more than 4% to nearly $88 a barrel, putting the crude oil benchmark on track for its biggest weekly gain since April. That move followed an Axios report that said the Trump administration had notified Israel it was deploying additional aerial assets to the region, signaling the US military could expand strikes on Iran as soon as this weekend.
Financial Times spoke with energy traders at the end of the week who warned that slowing tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz could trigger a more severe supply crunch than the first round of the US-Iran war because emergency reserves and stockpiles around the world that cushioned the earlier disruption have been mostly depleted.
"We've burned through all of the buffers we had. Everything," said one trader. "All of that's now gone.
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Bloomberg noted:
Fuel markets strengthened again, with the ICE gasoil crack closing at the highest on record and the Nymex heating oil crack the strongest since Mar
