Fragile Gulf Truce Keeps Oil Above $75 as AI Lifts Stocks
Brent held near $75.5 at week's end after a nearly 5 percent weekly jump, as Strait of Hormuz disruptions kept a war premium in prices while Wall Street closed higher on AI shares.
- Brent held near $75.5 at week's end, while WTI traded around $71.2 a barrel.
- The weekly rise in oil prices came to about 4.7 percent on supply disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz.
- Roughly 20 percent of the world's oil and gas trade passes through that strait.
- Wall Street closed higher, with the Nasdaq up about 1.3 percent, led by artificial intelligence companies.
Brent crude held near $75.5 a barrel on Friday, up almost 4.7 percent on the week, as disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz kept a so-called war premium embedded in prices. The U.S. benchmark WTI traded around $71.2 a barrel, tracking the same geopolitical signal. The week’s snapshot across global markets shows a split: energy climbed on fears of supply cutoffs, while New York equities booked gains led by the technology sector.
The truce between the United States and Iran, effectively broken after fresh attacks, put a risk premium back into the barrel. Talks are said to be continuing, yet the market is not buying any de-escalation until concrete steps appear. A war premium is not an abstraction: it is the gap between the price oil would carry in a calm environment and the one a buyer pays when there is a risk that tankers will not sail.
Why Do Gulf Tensions Push the Barrel Higher?
The answer lies in the geography of supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow maritime corridor through which roughly one fifth of the world’s trade in oil and liquefied gas passes. When doubt arises that the passage could be blocked or slowed, oil buyers move ahead of the risk, securing stock at higher prices, and that lifts the exchange quotation for everyone, not only those actually shipping cargo through the strait.
A weekly jump of 4.7 percent is not a large move in the historical context of energy shocks, but it is enough to be felt along the whole chain. The losers are crude buyers, refiners with thin margins and, ultimately, consumers at the pump in importing countries. The winners are Gulf exporters and oil companies selling at the higher benchmark. For Serbia, which covers most of its needs through imports, every dollar on the barrel feeds into procurement costs and, indirectly, into inflationary pressure, though the effect at the pump shows up with a lag.
History suggests a war premium tends to be temporary. Once tensions ease, prices often drift back toward levels set by supply and demand rather than fear. That makes the key question for the coming days whether the truce stays a dead letter or the talks turn into a real calming on the ground.
Wall Street Trusts Artificial Intelligence
While energy reacts to the Gulf, U.S. equities move to a different beat. Wall Street closed the week higher, with the Nasdaq up about 1.3 percent, led by large artificial intelligence companies. Investors still treat capital spending on AI infrastructure as an engine of revenue growth, so that sector absorbs part of the geopolitical nervousness that would otherwise drag down the broader index.
The divergence is instructive. The oil market and the stock market respond to different risks at the same moment: the first to the physical availability of a commodity, the second to expected profit growth at technology leaders. When those two signals part ways, as they did this week, the result is a picture in which an investor pays more for energy and more for a technology share at once.
For an observer in Serbia, the message is simple: fuel prices depend on events thousands of kilometers away, while global capital keeps hunting for returns in artificial intelligence. Do you think the war premium on oil will hold, or will the Gulf talks soon pull the barrel back down?
