Oil prices climb as Middle East conflict escalates
Yahoo Finance Video and Julie Hyman
Thu, July 23, 2026 at 8:19 PM GMT+5:30
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Yahoo Finance Breaking News Reporter Jake Conley joins Julie Hyman on Market Catalysts to discuss rising oil prices as the conflict in the Middle East reignites. Brent crude (BZ=F) oil prices pushed past $100 per barrel for the first time in months. While West Texas Intermediate futures (CL=F), the US benchmark, rose to $90 per barrel after Iran-backed Houthis said they had attacked tankers in the Red Sea
00:00Speaker A
This morning, all the focus is about 1,300 miles west of the straight of Hormuz focused on the Red Sea. We saw the Houthi militant rebels, a group based in Yemen backed financially by Iran, actually attack two Saudi Arabian vessels in the Red Sea. The idea here is that they’re going to threaten the 5 million or so barrels per day that Saudi Arabia is managing to send through a pipeline from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea
00:33Speaker A
That’s been a really critical release valve for the oil markets so far. If we lose those barrels, you lose basically half of what had recovered. And now you can’t get oil out of the straight of Hor Moos. You now can’t also get it out of the Red Sea. You’re going to force vessels to either go up through the Suez Canal, which adds time and weight and money, or try to push oil through some of the side smaller pipelines
01:00Speaker A
The whole picture is that the market is just re tightening and tightening at a moment where we spent the first phase of the war drawing down all of the global inventories we had available that were cushioning prices. That cushion is now gone. If we lose even more oil, the picture just gets worse on the physical side. We see Brent back over 100 crude in the US back over 90 as they react
01:31Speaker B
Um, the conversation, you know, even as the stock bells were going down, the conversation for a while was, why aren’t oil prices higher?
01:42Speaker A
That’s right
01:42Speaker B
So as you say, we’ve now worked down those stockpiles. We’re at sort of the bare minimums
01:50Speaker A
That’s right
01:51Speaker B
So what does that imply? Like why should we believe the oil analysts at this point? I mean, really, you know?
02:00Speaker A
No, no, fair. So I was on the phone yesterday with Joe De Flora who runs energy strategy at Rabo Bank. And he he’s an ex-hedge fund oil trader. He was saying to me, he feels crazy when he talks to clients because he’s telling them, I don’t understand why the prices on the futures market are $50 below where they should be. But the point he made to me, and I think it’s right is that the futures market always has one foot in the future. And right now that market is looking for and predicting that at some point we’re going to get a truth social post from President Trump saying, look,
02:34Speaker A
we’re signing another deal, we’re negotiating another peace agreement. You look at what JP Morgan, what Goldman Sachs, what any of the other the major Wall Street firms are predicting, they’re all still pricing in a deal as the ultimate solution here. But to Joe De Flora’s point yesterday when I was on the phone with him
02:58Speaker A
Oil’s either going to 120 or 150 or higher by the end of this year if this doesn’t slow down, or it’s going to end the year at 70 and there is really no picture in which we land in the middle, which is where the futures market is pricing oil to be in December
03:09Speaker B
Interesting
