What the Hormuz bulls are missing about oil under $100

What the Hormuz bulls are missing about oil under $100 Ten weeks of a closed strait should have sent crude past $150; instead Brent sits below $100, and the reasons point the wrong way for the bulls. Macquarie's economists, led by chief economist Ric Deverell, put the question bluntly in a report sent to Rigzone on Wednesday (2026-06-03): why is oil still under $100? On the same desk, BMI, a Fitch Solutions unit, said it had curbed its Dated Brent forecast amid bearish market sentiment in a note dated Thursday (2026-06-04).⁷ That matters because almost every headline since the war began has run the other way. ICE Brent crude front-month topped $111 a barrel on Tuesday (2026-05-12), with analysts raising forecasts on the Hormuz stalemate⁵, and by the ten-week mark the Economist reckoned nearly 14m barrels a day, 14% of global output, were being lost while the strait stayed shut⁶. The bullish case looks airtight. The price refuses to confirm it.⁶ Start with the offset most traders mention but few size properly. Morgan Stanley called the market a race against time, yet the arithmetic behind its resilience is the real story: a 3.8m barrel-a-day increase in US exports and a 5.5m barrel-a-day cut in Chinese imports have together shielded the rest of the world from 9.3m barrels a day of tightness⁴. That is not a rounding error. If even part of it reverses, the cushion that has kept Brent capped thins fast, and the bullish forecasts finally get their catalyst.⁴ The second signal is the one keeping the lights on right now, and it is finite. The EIA said the United States drew nearly 10m barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the week of 2026-05-11, the largest weekly withdrawal ever recorded². A record draw is doing real work to plug the gap. It also cannot continue indefinitely, and the day it slows is the day the supply math stops flattering the price.² Look harder at that Chinese number, because it is demand destruction dressed as supply relief. The Gulf normally supplies 40-80% of the seaborne crude imports of China, India, Japan and South Korea, and in 2025 Asia absorbed 87% of the crude and 86% of the LNG transiting Hormuz³. A 5.5m barrel-a-day import cut from China is not costless demand that vanished; it is buyers priced out or rationed. Brent is up around 40% since hostilities began, and European gas trades 92% above pre-war levels³. The cap under $100 is being paid for in destroyed consumption, not abundant barrels.³ The third signal is the forward view, and it is quietly bearish where the spot narrative is loud and bullish. A Bloomberg Intelligence survey found participants increasingly pricing crude capped near $100 over the next year, with a majority expecting Brent to average $81 to $100 over the next 12 months¹. Most respondents see disruptions averaging 3m to 7m barrels a day, and few anticipate outages above 10m¹. The same survey notes the EIA projects US crude output climbing to a record 14.1m barrels a day in 2027¹. Forecasts built on a closed strait sit alongside forecasts of record American supply. Both cannot dominate.¹ Put those together and the contrarian read is not that oil is about to spike. It is that the war premium is propped up by three things that can each unwind: a record SPR draw that must eventually ease, a Chinese demand cut that could snap back, and US export volumes already running near their limit. The single bearish signal in the consensus, a high-confidence short on Brent driven by geopolitics, is betting that de-escalation unwinds the premium faster than any new disruption can add to it.^1,4 What would settle it. Watch the weekly EIA SPR figure: a sharp drop in the draw rate from that record pace removes the prop without anything changing in the Gulf². Watch Chinese import data for any reversal of the 5.5m barrel-a-day cut, which would pull tightness straight back into the price⁴. And watch Iran's grip on the strait, which Tehran moved to strengthen even as it warned against further attacks². BMI has already started trimming its number⁷. The bulls have had ten weeks and a shut waterway. They still cannot get a 4 in front of the price.