The spread tripled; the streak ended.

A week that began with a pipeline still broken ended with it running, regional flows near four-fifths of pre-war levels, and the physical supply problem substantially solved. On that news American crude fell almost eight per cent. Gulf crude barely moved. The divergence is the story, because it separates two things that have been tangled together all month: the question of whether the world has enough oil, which now looks answered, and the question of whether a barrel can safely leave the Arabian Gulf, which does not. Twelve dollars is what the market charges for that second uncertainty. Meanwhile equities ended five weeks of decline while long bonds sold off to levels last seen before the financial crisis, which is an unusual pairing and tells you the equity market is trading the oil relief while the bond market is trading a Federal Reserve that has told it, repeatedly and in several voices this week, that it expects to raise rates again.

• The oil market divided — WTI down sharply on the week, Brent roughly flat, the gap tripling.
• Long yields made multi-decade highs — 10-year at 5.163%, 30-year at 5.488%.
• Equities won anyway — ending five consecutive weekly declines.

Figures are Friday 25 Sep’s close and changes over the week; weekly index changes are derived from Friday-to-Friday closes and are approximate, as is last Friday’s WTI level. US markets are closed Saturday. Single names appear as news, not recommendations. Times GST.

Oil fell on Friday partly on optimism that the Strait of Hormuz might reopen, and the specific news behind that optimism was that Iran has asked the United States to return to the memorandum of understanding the two sides reached in June. Readers of this briefing will recognise why we pause here. Since July we have applied a single rule to every diplomatic headline out of this conflict: an MOU is not a settlement, an agenda is not an outcome, and a deal described as close is not a deal. That rule was not invented in the abstract. It was learned from the June memorandum itself, which was agreed, reported as a breakthrough, and then failed to end the war. A request to revive precisely that document is therefore the clearest possible case for the discipline rather than an exception to it.

None of which makes the request unimportant. Taken with the road map Iran presented this week — a regional ceasefire and a gradual reopening of the strait — and with the suggestion from a senior Iranian official that the waterway could reopen within a week if Washington eases military pressure and lifts its port blockade, there is now more concrete diplomatic material on the table than at any point since February. Set against it: Iran’s security chief Mohsen Rezaei saying conditions have not changed, indirect talks at the United Nations producing little progress, and the Salalah ministerial still without a date. Both sets of facts are from the same seven days.

Vault Wealth’s house view: unchanged. We hold the gold position, the rate-side protection and the residual energy position we reframed yesterday as a hedge against the war continuing rather than against barrels being stuck. Friday changes nothing about that, because a request to revive a failed MOU is exactly the category of news our rule exists to filter. What would change it is a verified ceasefire or normal transit through the strait, and the twelve-dollar Brent–WTI spread is our own running measure of how far away that remains. One note on our framework, now that it has completed its first full week. The targets we published last Sunday put Brent inside our base-case band, the 10-year firmly in the bear band, the supply outcome better than even our bull case, and the equity move inside the bull range. In other words the week did four different things at once — and our old habit of summarising all of it in a single index target would have obscured every one of them. We would rather report a scorecard that shows dispersion than one that flatters us with a single verdict.