The count

11 ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday and 8 on Sunday, against more than a hundred a day before the war, according to the ship-tracking firm Kpler. About 20 percent of the world's oil and gas used to move through that water. The temporary deal with the United States in early June lifted the count again; the resumption of strikes about a month later pushed it back down. Many of the ships still sailing switch off their position transmitters while crossing.[1]

Switching off the transmitter is the clearest price in the whole dataset. An invisible ship is harder to charter, harder to insure and harder to sell a cargo from, and an owner who accepts those costs has decided that the discount for invisibility is smaller than the premium for being seen. That is a market pricing military risk directly, without waiting for a freight index to catch up. The obvious caveat is that going dark is also long-standing practice in sanctioned trades, so part of what the counter registers may be a change in who is still sailing rather than a change in how dangerous the crossing is.[1]

The alternative route acquires a toll

Some tankers carrying Saudi crude had moved to a Red Sea lane running between the kingdom and west Africa; that was the detour the market found when Hormuz thinned out. On 20 July the Houthi movement declared a blockade of Saudi Arabia's Red Sea ports, and the UK Maritime Trade Operations agency has logged several attacks on ships in the past week. Kpler counted 28 commodity vessels through Bab el-Mandeb on Saturday, six of them dark, with overall traffic at roughly half its pre-attack level — the half that stayed is the half the threat does not name, because the announced target is Saudi shipping specifically. A selective blockade is cheap to run and awkward to answer: no single flag state's navy is obviously the aggrieved party. Crude loadings bound for Asia are now down to about four a day, the lowest since the war began, and Tim Wilkins of Intertanko describes a "broadening, deteriorating, and increasingly complex security situation".[1]

This is where the route talks described on 2 August become a commercial question rather than a diplomatic one. Iran said its negotiations with Oman on a third Hormuz corridor, with separate entry and exit lanes, were in their final stages. If such an arrangement is published and takes effect, the test is whether cargo believes it rather than whether it carries a signature: a return to more than thirty Hormuz transits a day on Kpler's count, with Asia-bound loadings above ten a day within a month of publication, would mean owners and underwriters have accepted the lanes as real. Traffic that stays near single figures would mean the corridor exists on paper and the risk premium is still being set by the people with the drones.[1], [2]