The Oil Blockade Isn’t Spooking Markets — Yet

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The folks are never watching. Show, sale! Welcome to Prodigy Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is April 14th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices climbed on hopes of a deal with Iran. Meanwhile, oil prices rose as the US moved to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. We'll talk about that in a second. The yield on 10-year trash trees fell and finally, Oracle shares surged nearly 13% after the company revealed new AI tools for the utility sector. That gain led software stocks higher with broader sentiment turning positive to start the week. OK, what's happening? The US Navy has blockaded the Strait of Hormuz. The blockade went into effect yesterday morning after peace talks in Pakistan collapsed this weekend. In a post on Truth Social, Trump threatened to, quote, eliminate any Iranian ships that come near the blockade. Oil jumps nearly 8% on the news, climbing back above $100 per barrel by the afternoon Trump said Iran had reached out about negotiations and oil prices paired some gains. This latest travel at the Strait follows a hot inflation report back in the States, where the price of oil has already pushed gas prices higher. So here to discuss what this blockade means, what these latest developments in Iran mean. We are speaking with Michael Gaepin, managing director and chief US economist at Morgan Stanley. Michael, we have a blockade on the blockade and it's a little hard to understand however one feels about it because we do have oil prices, obviously rising, but then also we have stock prices rising. I mean, investors seem to be somewhat bullish in a lot of ways coming into the week. What do you make of this blockade? What does it actually mean for investors? Well, you're right that I think investors I don't want to use the word complacent because certainly they're not complacent, but I think they're optimistic in the sense that the interpretation of markets is that the day-to-day events here are probably still what they would call in a de-escalation camp, meaning it doesn't appear like things are escalating in a way. So oil is staying around this $100 per barrel level that's certainly a lot higher than it was going into it. But the view from the market is $100 oil may not be great, but it's something the US economy can withstand and the global economy can withstand as well. So it's inflation's rising, yes, that will crimp purchasing power. We can talk about that, but it does not appear that oil is at a level that would destroy demand, right? Because a little bit of oil, I mean, I should say it's been more than a little, but a large increase in oil, it initially shows up inflation, but if it rises too much, then what it starts to do is weaken activity. And I think the market is telling you, we're in that first stage, we're in that first part. It's likely an inflation story, it may dampen demand, but the global economy should remain in an expansion in 2026, and that's why I think stocks have rebounded. What do you make of the inflation report that we saw as well from March came in at 3.3%, two-year high, gasoline up over 20% in a single month. I mean, that inflation report was pretty bad, but of course it is measuring, I mean, the immediate effects of the war in Iran. I mean, as the US economist over at Morgan Stanley, like what are you supposed to do with that data? Is that meaningful in your long-term projections of how things are going to go? It's certainly meaningful for where we think headline inflation is going, right? So we typically split out headline and core. Core is X energy and X food, because these are commodities determined in global markets, and core kind of gives us a view of where underlying inflation trends may be going. And the data history in the US, I mean, this goes back 30 to 40 years now, where shocks to oil tend to push headline inflation higher in the US, but it often has very limited second round effects on core. That's important from the economist's point of view, because you're saying, okay, we get the direct effect from energy, we can't avoid that. It goes right into gasoline prices very quickly in the US, but the good news is history says we don't get second round effects, where other prices rise because gasoline prices are higher or oil prices are higher. So we've raised our forecast for headline inflation. We actually think headline inflation will peak around 3.7% on a year-on-year basis. So there's still probably a little more to come in that regard, but we really haven't changed our outlook on core inflation. We think core inflation can actually move a little lower as we get into the second half of the year. That will be dependent though, I think primarily on whether the tariff passed through to goods prices, and we think it will by the middle of the year, but that's how we're looking at it. It's a boost to headline inflation, but it may not change the underlying dynamics of inflation and inflation could be lower by the end of the year. Walk me through that thesis then, because my understanding is, I mean, yes, we see the obviously immediate impacts of oil prices on gasoline, but we also know that what's happening, if the straight up home moves is blockaded further, then I mean, fertilizer prices will go up. You need fertilizer to grow food, which would mean food prices would go up. In addition, you need gasoline to transport things around the country, to move stuff from countries to other countries. I mean, my understanding is that pretty much the whole economy is dependent on oil in one way or another. So how would it not pass through to core inflation, to things like food, groceries, consumer goods, et cetera? Well, two things. One is higher oil prices tend to weaken activity, right? So gasoline prices go up, you and I pay more for prices at the pump. We can't spend it elsewhere. So demand in the economy actually slows. And it's that softening and demand that softening and activity, which means other prices don't tend to go up. Now, this is just what history suggests is the guide. It may not be the case this time around. Inflation in the US has been above its 2% target for about five years. And you make good points about, let's say, the downstreaming of oil into other distillates and products. And like, for example, food costs do involve a lot of transportation. So it's conceivable, maybe we do get some second round effects this time. So history says we won't, but we can't be too blasé about it. And we may get it. The other point I'd like to follow up on that, it's a good point you make, is right now we're still largely talking about this as the effect of higher oil prices. What you're getting at with the closure, the potential long-term closure of the straight is, well, at some point this may turn into a quantity story. So right now I might be able to get as much oil as I need at a higher price. What happens if it's not available at any price? Then you could start to see things through the lens of supply chain disruptions like we had during COVID. Where that's gonna show up first is in Asia, because I think as you know about 85% of the oil that comes out of the straight of Hormuz, its destination is Asia. So if some economies are gonna experience outright shortages first, it will be there. And then you're talking about I can't get the oil, or as you say, the fertilizer or the distillate that I need, therefore activity has to stop. So those are the risks. We could get second round effects on inflation because we've been above target for so long, or this conflict could go on long enough where it actually it changes from price effects to quantity effects. Then you're right, we could see a much more persistent inflation story. Right, it is really interesting, just kind of depressing almost that when you look through history, basically what you're describing is that when oil prices rise, the reason that everything else doesn't rise is because people are so strapped for cash that you literally can't test them not that much further. Either way, the situation is you're testing the American consumer literally to their limit. And if you hit that limit, then there is a world in which companies will basically say, okay, well, we can't raise our prices further because they're just not gonna pay for this. It does get into sort of murky territory, I think, when we think about things like food, where it's like, well, you gotta pay for food. But I mean, it's just striking that we are getting to that point. Just from an investment perspective, I mean, the way this story has changed is getting almost comical. Like we start with, we're only gonna be in Iran for four or five weeks. Then we say, actually, we're gonna increase that and we're gonna create a deadline. And then we get to the deadline and we say, we're gonna escalate this. And then we say, actually, no, we're not escalating it. Now we have a deal. And then we say, actually, wait, no, the deal didn't really work because now more bombs are being dropped. And so now they're gonna blockade the thing. So we don't have a deal. Now we're gonna blockade in response. I mean, in a funny way, nothing is really happening here. And yet every time something happens, the market is reacting and saying, okay, something's changed. Now we have a blockade. Now we don't have a blockade. Now oil is gonna pass through fine. And to me, I'm sort of like, shouldn't we just not even be reacting at all? What is the correct response to what we're seeing? You laid it out very well. I would argue that markets are reacting a little less to the headlines now than they were two to three to four weeks ago. So as you said, in your introduction oil was up around eight, nine, 10% today in response to the implementation of the blockade, but US equity markets did okay. So I do think the market is discounting a little bit the headline noise, looking through some of the day-to-day volatility in a way that it did not do it a few weeks ago. So I agree with you that you can be very disconcerting to hear headlines one way, one day, and the other way the next day. But I think the market's actually starting to filter that out better and volatility has come down. I think a second factor behind that is markets had to de-risk for the first two to three to four weeks of this. Most investors were positioned for rates to fall, at least at the front end of yield curves, all throughout most of the world, not all the world, but much of the world. And what this oil price shock did, of course, was push yields higher. So markets needed to rebalance and de-risk and get out of positions and kind of get flat or neutral as we would call it. That process leads to a lot of initial volatility, but now that positions have been squared to use the terminology of the industry. And risk is a little more neutral. Now markets can afford to look through some of this headline noise. Yeah, I mean, we've seen how investors are reacting. As an economist, it's a slightly different job because you're not necessarily trying to make a bet on what's gonna happen. You're just trying to understand what are the possible potential scenarios, what are the possible futures? I guess as an economist, I mean, when you put your economist hat on, how seriously have you taken these developments in terms of their potential to, I guess adjust the trajectory of the US economy? Like when you see the headlines and you see, okay, now he's blockaded the blockade, do you look at that and then say, okay, well, this is going to change the economy in this way or this isn't gonna change things? I mean, how is an economist supposed to digest what's happening here? So the way that we've approached it is to kind of think of the world through three lenses, three possible paths here. One is kind of the everything goes back to normal when we returned to February 27th. We think that's very unlikely. We think there has been a structural regime shift in the balance of power in the Middle East and the way oil flows in and out of the strait. So we're not here thinking, hey, if we just get over this or that, things are gonna go back to where they were six to eight weeks ago. So that leaves us kind of two possible outcomes. Obviously there's more than two, but I'm just in terms of trying to think about how things may go. And one is what I'll call the oil is high, but not too high. And then the second one is oil moves so high as to create recessionary kind of outcome. So there's a non-linearity here where above a certain price, oil becomes really problematic for the US expansion and the global expansion. Below that level, it's kind of what I was saying before. It's about a spike in headline inflation. It suppresses demand a little bit in the US, but the US economy continues to go and the expansion continues. But after all, we had about $120 per barrel oil at the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Now it was a slightly different US economy at that point in time, a lot of fiscal stimulus in the economy, a lot of jobs being added, but this price level of oil is not unusual. So we have passed it through the lens of essentially saying, well, the average consumer, about 2.5% of their spending goes to gasoline. Lower middle income households, more like 4% to 5%, about double the average. And so what it's really doing is that shock, that hit to real disposable income and real purchasing power is basically offsetting the fiscal stimulus that we assume from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. So in some of our prior conversations, before the Iran conflict started, we were talking about how optimistic the outlook was for the US this year. We've trimmed the sales on that from growth rates that could be above 2.5%, closer to 3% maybe, and thinking, well, this is just gonna offset that fiscal stimulus. Maybe it's another year of growth around 2%, but you're getting inflation moving higher. Maybe we get the Fed cuts that we were expecting. Maybe we don't, maybe the Fed stays on the sideline. So right now we're saying it's a headwind, but we need to be watchful as we were saying that maybe it becomes a quantity story, maybe it does re-escalate, maybe oil moves to 125 to $150 a barrel. And then I think equity markets would look much weaker, sentiment would be worse. And in addition to weaker spending, maybe what you get then is negative wealth effects. And the private sector that says, well, let's delay that capital spending plan, let's delay those hiring plans. Right. And then the economy can slow down much more abruptly. All right, Michael Gaepin, Managing Director and Chief US Economist at Morgan Stanley. Michael, always appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you. After the break, we look at Anthropics Cybersecurity Threat. And if you're enjoying the show, please follow our new ProfG Markets YouTube channel the link is in the description. This is advertiser content brought to you by Virgin Atlantic Ed a couple of weeks back. I got you a birthday gift, not to pat myself on the back, but it was a pretty good one. It was indeed. You surprised me with Virgin Atlantic upper class tickets to London. So tell us all about it. It was pretty incredible. From the moment I entered that upper class cabin, I have to tell you, I felt like a VIP. Anything I needed, a drink, snack, assistance with the seat. Flat seats. Flat seats. That's the key. Flat seats, exactly. Had the four course meal, got my champagne, very delicious, enjoyed the food. And the journey home? The journey home was great. I went to the Virgin Atlantic LHR Clubhouse, that's the Heathrow Clubhouse. Heathrow Clubhouse was awesome. Got myself a coffee, headed over to the meditation pod that they call the soma dome. Kind of felt like a sort of spaceship where you relax and think nice thoughts. So I did that for a little bit. Then we went over to the wing, which are these acoustically sealed booths where you could do some work. You could even record a podcast. I didn't do that, but maybe I should have. It was a very enjoyable experience. So Ed, the real question here is, what are you planning to get me for my birthday? See the world differently with Virgin Atlantic. Flying should be more than just transport. It is part of the adventure. Go to virginatlantic.com to learn more. Tickets and lounge access provided by Virgin Atlantic. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly Democratic cities for ICE raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually, every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. We're back with Proff G Markets. Anthropic announced its most powerful model yet last week and decided the world isn't ready for it. A model called Claude Mythos found thousands of previously undetected software bugs and identified security vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser. Instead of a public launch, Anthropic is limiting access to a group of the world's biggest tech companies, including the company's major competitors. The consortium known as Project Glasswing will use Mythos to find and patch vulnerabilities before bad actors do. So how powerful is this model really? And what does it mean for cybersecurity in the future? Joining us to discuss this was speaking with Teresa Payton, CEO of Fortress Solutions and former White House Chief Information Officer. Teresa, I mean, this model, regardless of what we even know about it, has just totally shaken everyone's confidence. And it was very scary that they basically got together and said, we're not even gonna release the product because it's that powerful. What do we know about this model and what are your takeaways from the announcement of Claude Mythos? Sure, absolutely. Thanks for having me. And this is a very important topic for a couple of reasons. One, I know there is sort of a camp that says, well, maybe this is a marketing ploy or maybe they're overplaying their hand on this and it's not as bad as we think. And for all intents and purposes, they're allowed to say that for now until we have a third party point of view because this is self-reported by Anthropoc. However, Anthropoc at their ethos talks about having an ethical constitution and they've brought in a lot of experts from the outside to talk about safety and ethics and security and reliability. So let's assume the self-reporting is accurate for right now until we know more. If it is accurate, that means that Mythos as a frontier AI is actually the smartest AI on the planet right now. And if it is true based on their self-reports, it's gonna be the best and the worst nightmare for cybersecurity teams everywhere. I'm gonna quote somebody on my team who said, I won't say the name, a bomb just went off in the cybersecurity industry and we all need to read everything we can about it to understand how it can help us and how it can be used against us. What do you make of how the markets have been reacting? Because I mean, if we look at what happened last week, Mythos is announced and it did look like a bomb went off. I mean, some of the biggest names absolutely plummeting. Then we come into the beginning of the week and people seem a little bit less concerned. Some of these big names CrowdStrike was up, Palo Alto networks went up, Cloudflare went up. Like a lot of the big cybersecurity names are actually rallying now. What changed in the minds of investors, do you think? Oh, well, I mean, they did have a weekend to think about things. To process, yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I mean, there is strategic positioning around what day of the week you deliver bad news. And so people at the weekend maybe to think about it, but also to say, you know what, let's learn more. So there's this consortium coming together with Anthropoc and we're gonna hear more. But again, if the self-reporting is true, that means that Mythos in a limited release found thousands of very serious bugs, including zero days. They said some of them were hidden almost over two decades. And if that is the case, that means that every cybersecurity product that has been installed did not find these. And so we have to ask the question, what does that mean for today's cybersecurity products and are they gonna have to completely re-imagine the design of these products with a tool like Mythos? Now, also, what if somebody else has built a tool like Mythos, but they don't have the ethical kind of foundational elements that Anthropoc has committed themselves to? That should also be a huge concern right now, because there could be a hidden Mythos that none of us is aware of that is ready to launch. What are you supposed to do then as someone who works inside of security? Like, what are you supposed to do with this information? I mean, clearly it's a bad idea to just write it off and say, oh no, it's all just marketing. It's not real, it's not serious. But then on the other hand, I mean, how do you accept your fate? Like, are you just accepting fate if it's just, this is just infinitely more powerful than all of the solutions that we've had in the past and this is going to completely destroy the industry as we know it, or at least completely disrupt the industry as we know it? Like, what do you do if you're working inside of security and you see this, should you really be, I mean, how do you process it? How do you even change your behaviors moving forward? I think this opens up a new door. You know, the way I like to think about this, you know, I used to live in Hawaii and so when the tsunami bell goes off, you don't say, oh gosh, this is it, this is when we're all gone. You go to higher ground, right? And you know the plan and you get the playbook out and you hear the bell, you hear the warning, you find out the much time you have and you execute against that plan. And so this should be our tsunami bell warning of whatever you were planning on doing, you need to operate at machine speed and not at bureaucratic speed. So a couple of things, because I don't want people to not feel empowered and engaged on what to do here. So if you're an executive listening to our conversation right now, couple of things you need to be doing, you need to be asking your vendors and your CISO right now, how are we systematically testing our critical software, our open source dependencies, our cloud infrastructure against AI augmented vulnerability discovery? Because mythos will eventually be commercially available, but somebody else may make it available and it won't be in the good guy's hands, it'll be in the bad guy's hands. Ask whether or not because of the vendor relationships you already have, do you have access to get Intel for what they're learning as they continue to run the tool? And then also be asking your board and your risk committees if they are getting regular quantified updates on the exposure that the company has due to sort of this dual use AI risk of frontier models being used against you instead of on your behalf. I would say for the security teams, a lot of the things you already had on your roadmap that you just haven't had a chance to get to because the enterprise you work for hasn't prioritized it or put money against it, the door's now open for you to go back in and have that conversation to say, we have to operate at machine speed because that's gonna be what's coming at us. What do you make of this, the fact that Treasury Secretary Scott Besant actually gathered all of the big bank CEOs at the White House to talk about what this would mean and to talk about the cybersecurity threat here. I mean, that was a moment where I was like, okay, this is real, this is very scary. We're literally trying to figure out how to regulate this thing. Or I don't know what the conversation even was. I mean, what do you think was said in that room? What should have been said? What do you make of the fact that that happened? Yeah, I mean, so my understanding is many of them were already there for another reason, for another conversation, but this is fairly unprecedented to have. This kind of a meeting called potentially on this topic, we don't, there's no minutes of the meeting, we don't know what was discussed, but the fact that they got together at this level and had a conversation should give everybody sort of pause. One, we know that the way the world moves around is money has to move around. And so obviously there's concern about some type of an attack that could either stop money from moving or make sure that money moves to the wrong places and not to the right places. And remember, money does now move at the speed of machine. So how are we protecting at the speed of machine? That probably was a big part of the conversation and making sure that people really understood this is your top priority. What do you think this will ultimately mean for AI policy? Because it seems as though if this is as powerful and disruptive as Anthropic says it is, I could imagine a world where we basically say, well, we can't let this out because it'll literally destroy our digital economy. If it can just hack everything, if it can hack every major bank, which makes me think, okay, well then the government will just say, no, this, you can't release this product, it's illegal. And what do you think will actually happen here from a regulatory perspective? And as someone who actually worked in the White House, what do you think are some of the correct pods forward? What should we do about this? This is a very tough decision for policymakers. And I feel for them, you can't hold this product back. And the reason why I say that is, is somebody else is developing the same thing. It's sort of the equivalent of saying, we don't build up, whether it's a military for kinetic perspective because we wouldn't want to have a military because that could create sort of unsafe posture. Well, but if somebody else is building a military, you need to at least kind of have that perspective. So it's the same thing with something like this. You don't want to say, you can't release this tool because it's dangerous. Well, it's dangerous not to have this tool now that we know that we have it because cyber criminals and nation states, if they weren't already building one, they just literally read the headline and they're building one. And so what you have to do is figure out, how can you take a tool like this, make it commercially available so it is a force for good, that it has the right governance and guardrails around it so it doesn't end up in bad hands. But just like a hammer can help build a house, a hammer can also be used as a weapon. So you can't blame the tool, you have to have the right policy and you have to have the right governance. Something we are sorely lacking right now. Yeah. All right. Teresa Payton, CEO of Forcedless Solutions, former White House Chief Information Officer. Teresa, very interesting times. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. Here's a fun fact to end the show today. Ever since we invaded Iran, Google search interest for Epstein has fallen 75%. And many have theorized that the real reason we invaded Iran wasn't to destroy their nuclear capabilities, which according to the president had already been destroyed, but rather it was to distract our attention away from the Epstein files. Personally, I think that that theory is a little far-fetched, but if it's true, well then you would have to admit, it's kind of working. But there is something implicitly puzzling about this theory and about every theory of distraction that we keep hearing about for that matter. And that is the following. Since when did prosecuting a crime in America become dependent on our attention? I mean, if a guy robbed a bank, for example, and we knew he robbed a bank, would that not be enough as it is to just bring him to court? I mean, would it even matter if regular Americans knew about the crime and talked about the crime, if the crime were discussed on TV? No, all of that would be irrelevant, because again, it's not about how much attention we paid to the crime, it's about whether or not the guy committed a crime. Our opinion doesn't matter. And yet, we seem to no longer live in that world. We seem to live in a world where prosecution is no longer the responsibility of law enforcement, but it seems we believe that prosecution is the responsibility of citizens. And it's not just Epstein. I mean, consider all of the insider trading scandals we've discussed as it relates to the Iran War, the billions of dollars of oil futures that were traded just minutes before Trump made major announcements related to Iran, or the millions of dollars that Trump's children made timing their investments in crypto, timing their investments in defense companies and drone startups, in accordance with the president's actions, and somehow we all believe that it's on us to identify these crimes and to examine the evidence and keep track of the trades and of course, to not get distracted by other things. Why is that? Why isn't that the job of the cops? Well, this strikes at the heart of one of the most fundamental changes we're witnessing in this administration. And that is, despite being tough on crime, as they often say, what we're seeing is that law enforcement is actually being systematically dismantled right before our very eyes. And we're seeing this across multiple different agencies. The SEC, for example, whose literal job is to investigate financial crime, they have seen their staffing numbers drop by nearly 20% in just one year under Trump. And as a result, the SEC's enforcement actions have fallen roughly 30%. That is one of the largest drops in history. The same is true of the Department of Justice. Last year, Trump cut nearly a billion dollars worth of DOJ crime prevention programs. And in addition, white collar crime prosecutions have been cut in half. The same is also true of the IRS. This is the agency whose job is to find and prevent tax evasion, to prevent tax crimes. Their workforce has been cut by roughly a third since the previous administration and audit rates, which already declined 9% last year, are on track to decline another 39% this year. And this is before the additional funding cuts that are planned for next year. So put another way, despite all of the rhetoric, Trump and his team are actually defunding the police. They're actually attacking and dismantling the mandate of law and order, and they are especially doing it in the Department of White Collar Crime and of High Finance. So when I ask myself, why do we suddenly think it's our job to investigate criminals and to figure out financial crimes and to hold it all to account? The answer is quite simple, because it now is. Yes, law enforcement still exists. But as I hope the numbers show, we are witnessing a systematic and growing neglect by those organizations to actually enforce the law. And it's all coming from the top down. Now, I know what you're probably thinking, this is a market show, aren't we supposed to be talking about markets? Yes, it is a market show, and yes, I agree. But the fundamental underpinning of any market system is that there are rules. There are laws of the game that you have to follow. But if those laws don't exist anymore, or if the referees whose job is to enforce those laws don't exist anymore, as we are increasingly seeing, well, then we should start to recognize how the game of investing is fundamentally changing. And more importantly, how we might be witnessing the arrival of an entirely different game. OK, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss, edited by Joel Passon, and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams, our research team is Dan Chalan, Isabella Kinsel, Chris Nodonikou and Mia Silverio, and our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thanks for listening to Proffety Markets from Proffety Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson, I will see you tomorrow. Your time is valuable, your perspective should be too. The economist cuts through the noise with the stories that truly shape your world. 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