The Brent-WTI spread is the number that matters right now

Brent hit $120 Monday. It's at $113 now. Everyone's talking about the $120 number. [pause] Here's the thing. That's not the number. The number is the Brent-WTI spread blowing out past $8. That's your signal. When the Strait of Hormuz gets contested — Iran just expanded the area it controls to include Fujairah and Khorfakkan — you're not pricing sentiment. You're pricing basis risk. Every long that assumed normal routing now has a routing problem. [pause] The U.S. is running Project Freedom. Fifteen thousand service members, guided-missile destroyers, over a hundred aircraft. That's not a deterrent. That's a premium. China's MOFCOM separately invoked its 2021 anti-sanctions blocking rules to shield five Chinese refineries from U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil. Sanctions architecture fracturing in parallel. [pause] The spread tells you what the market actually believes about transit normalization. $120 is a headline. $8-plus Brent-WTI is a regime.