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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway.

And I'm Joe Wisenthall.

Joe, one of the weirdnesses of our current market moment is that you have all these oil analysts who keep talking about how the Strait of Hormuz closure is like the theoretical

exercise that the entire market used to have nightmares about.

This was like the big risk in the entire oil market.

And yet, and yet, if you look at the actual price of oil and where it's trading, I mean, it's gone up. It's gone up a lot. But it's not, it doesn't strike me as panic levels. Yeah, I mean, it's gone up a lot. And, you know, it started the year, I'm just looking at Brent. It started the year around 60. It had climbed to around 70 before the war started, now at 115. So it's a huge move in some sense. But it's not even in 2022 levels, which were very high. And all that's true. And yet there is this disconnect. I don't understand. Like, why isn't it at 200 yet or whatever? Because straightforward moves is closed, et cetera. Why isn't it even higher? But then the other thing is, okay, like prices are up a lot. But then you look at like what governments around the world are doing. And it's like hair on fire panic, particularly in East Asia. So you get stories about, you know, Korean government workers being told to drive on every drive to work, depending whether their license plate number and even an

odd, like extreme rationing. Yeah. And so I'm trying to like it still feels like there's some

puzzle pieces here that I'm trying to fit together. Absolutely. The other thing I would say is it feels also like there's this disconnect between what's going on in the financial world and what's going on in the physical world. Yeah, which I don't get. Yeah, and there was this really interesting note. This wasn't purely related to oil, but you could kind of extrapolate from it. But it was from Bloomberg Green Markets the other day,

and they were talking about urea coming out of the Middle East and the pricing that they've

been seeing from it. And one of the analysts says the real issue on pricing is that while

sellers and buyers can quote almost any price, nothing is actually getting out of the Gulf.

That reality makes most discussion academic rather

than representative of actual business. So I wonder how much of that is happening in the oil

market as well, where you have all these quotes that are flashing across the screen, but

like for barrels that are essentially not going anywhere for a while. Yeah, and I still don't

totally get it because, right, like these things do have to settle at some point and I don't know, I'm confused. And then there were those headlines

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