Brent crude surged to $107.40 a barrel Thursday, its highest level since May. Then it went higher. Friday's session pushed the benchmark to $108.77, a fresh four-month high, in a rally that's stopped feeling like a spike and started feeling like a new floor. The move came fast, better than 6% in a single session. West Texas Intermediate crossed $102, a level it hadn't seen since spring.

Nobody's betting on a quick fix anymore. "The market is not returning to calm," said Jim Burkhard, global head of crude oil research at S&P Global. It's adjusting instead, he said, to a new normal defined by unresolved conflict and maritime risk.

Goldman Sachs commodities co-head Daan Struyven has already floated $120 a barrel if the shipping attacks keep escalating. Nobody at Goldman sounded surprised by that number.

Tehran's Assembly Lines Are Running Again

There's a harder problem sitting underneath the price action. Iran has resumed producing ballistic missiles. The Wall Street Journal reported it on Thursday, citing U.S. and Middle Eastern officials, and the detail that matters is where: underground, at facilities including the Khojir complex southeast of Tehran, using components stockpiled before the war. Both liquid- and solid-propellant weapons. Quietly, methodically, in defiance of what Washington has been telling the public.

That public position has been that Iran's missile program is finished. U.S. officials have said strikes destroyed as much as 90% of the country's missile and drone industrial base. Finished, it turns out, is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

One American official told the Journal the rebuild likely started after Tehran and Washington struck a preliminary deal in June to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and begin winding the war down. Output is still well below prewar levels. Damaged factories and a naval blockade choking off imported parts have seen to that. But it's running.

A Second Chokepoint Tightens

Saudi Arabia told OPEC its crude production fell again in August. Down 1.9 million barrels a day, to 6.238 million, the kingdom's lowest output since the 1990 Gulf War. Exports fell further still, to roughly 3.1 million barrels a day, the weakest pace in more than a decade. Riyadh is getting squeezed from both directions at once.

The Strait of Hormuz has been the main chokepoint since the war started in late February. Now the Red Sea route is closing too. Houthi forces seized the Yemeni port of Mocha on Thursday, tightening their grip on the approaches to the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, the passage Saudi Arabia has leaned on to route around Hormuz. The group already held Hodeida and other territories nearby. Mocha gives it a second foothold on the same waterway, and Saudi Arabia is running out of water to sail through.

The war has a human cost inside Saudi Arabia now, too. A wave of Houthi strikes wounded 73 people, women and children among them, in the southern cities of Abha, Khamis Mushait, Jazan, and Najran. Maj. Gen. Turki al-Malki, spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen, called it a "serious escalation," a violation of the kingdom's sovereignty.

The Houthis see it differently, of course. A military statement this week said the group would "uphold the equation of siege-for-siege until the aggression stops and the siege is lifted." Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Mahdi al-Mashat, head of the Houthi-aligned Supreme Political Council, offered a presidential pardon to Saudi-backed fighters on the western coast willing to lay down their arms. The gesture came as Sanaa-aligned forces reported gains near Hodeida. Carrot in one hand, missile in the other.

The Recovery That Isn't Keeping Up

Shipping through Hormuz has resumed. It just hasn't resumed enough. Oil-product exports through the strait are running at roughly 1 million barrels a day, according to Vortexa tanker-tracking data and comments this week from Vitol Group Chief Executive Officer Russell Hardy at a conference in Singapore. Before the war, that number was closer to 4 million, excluding liquefied petroleum gas.

Crude has recovered better, to roughly two-thirds of prewar volumes by Goldman's count. Products haven't, and that gap shows up somewhere real: at the pump. Diesel prices in the U.S. are climbing toward record territory as refiners scramble for fuel to keep trucks, ships, and factories moving.

A War With No Exit Date

Inside the White House, the mood has changed. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have privately warned Trump that the conflict could outlast his own term, which runs through January 2029. The Journal reported it, citing U.S. officials. Trump's public timeline tells a different story. He said this week he expects the war to end "immediately after" November's midterms, betting that Iran is just running out the clock, hoping for a friendlier Washington on the other side of the vote.

At the first Republican midterm convention, in Dallas, he floated something else entirely: a name change. "We'll call it the Trump Strait," he told the crowd, resurrecting an idea he'd raised a week earlier. Tanker owners are not waiting around for that to happen. Freight rates for the largest crude carriers have climbed toward $800,000 a day, tacking several dollars a barrel onto the delivered cost of every Asia-bound cargo.

Meanwhile, a Bloomberg investigation published Thursday adds another layer. Qorvis, a Washington lobbying firm, has represented companies that Western officials say are controlled by sanctioned Iranian and Russian oil traders, among them Singapore-based Wellbred Capital and Dubai-based 2Rivers Group. In March, Qorvis reportedly urged the Treasury Department to ease sanctions on Iranian and Russian oil to help calm markets. Days later, the department did exactly that. The firm says it has never taken sanctioned money.

What Gold Is Trying to Tell Oil Traders

There's a model that suggests none of this is close to peaking. Market technician Tom McClellan has tracked a roughly 20-month lag between gold price peaks and the crude oil tops that follow them, a relationship he ties to how both assets price inflation expectations. Gold hit its record, near $5,589 an ounce, on Jan. 28. Run the clock forward on McClellan's math, and oil's next major top doesn't arrive until around September 2027.

Even McClellan is careful here. His model calls timing better than magnitude, he'll say. Fair enough. But for a market already living through an active war and a second chokepoint sliding shut, a forecast that pushes the peak out another year isn't the kind of thing anyone wanted to read this week.