The United States Navy turned away 55 ships from the Strait of Hormuz because talks stalled. Not because the talks succeeded and then fell apart. Not because someone said something mean. The talks just stalled. Like a 1997 Honda Civic on the side of I-95.
Five months of this.
Somewhere in Virginia, a defense contractor is explaining to his kid's school counselor why Daddy needs to work late again. The Strait is still blocked, sweetheart. Seventeen oil tankers are floating in circles off the coast of Oman. But Daddy got his quarterly bonus, so we can finally afford that trampoline.
Fifty-five ships. The math works out to about eleven ships per month. The Navy is turning away vessels at the same rate a Red Lobster in Tulsa turns away parties of six on a Wednesday. This is the pace of modern geopolitical crisis. Slow. Methodical. Thoroughly priced in.
Retail traders saw this headline and bought crude oil futures at 9:47 a.m. Eastern. By 10:15 they were posting in Discord about how the Strait of Hormuz is actually bullish for Tesla because supply chain disruptions favor vertical integration. By noon they'd lost $1,400 and were blaming Jerome Powell.
The blockade has choked the Strait for more than five months, which is the exact amount of time it takes for a crisis to stop being a crisis and become a new normal. The talking heads called it a flashpoint in January. By March they called it a developing situation. Now they call it a thing that is still happening.
Nobody's resolving this. The two sides remain far apart, which is diplomatic speak for they're not even in the same room. They're not on the same continent. One of them might be dead.
But fifty-five ships got turned around, and that number will be fifty-eight next week, and the futures market will gap up for six minutes before remembering it doesn't care.
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