What Happened
President Trump issued an explicit threat of military annihilation against Iran, invoking the potential destruction of an entire civilisation. Given Iran's stated doctrine of closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately 20% of global seaborne oil flows, in the event of military confrontation, this is not rhetorical noise. This is a direct threat to the physical oil supply chain.
What Our Data Says
Our pre-existing macro framework already carried a 20% tracked probability for a geopolitical supply shock exceeding 2 million barrels per day, and that was the baseline before tonight. That probability just took a step-change upward. WTI crude was last recorded at $115.25 (stale, 4.2 hours old, treat as indicative only), already up approximately 15% over the prior month and mechanically loading into the next CPI print. A Strait of Hormuz disruption scenario targets $140-165 WTI, which would push CPI mathematically above 3.0% within 60 days, trapping the Fed completely between collapsing growth and accelerating inflation.
On VIX, there is a meaningful data quality issue: the PriceSnapshot reads 34.54 while the FRED resolver shows 24.17, a divergence of over 10 points. The 124-hour staleness makes the PriceSnapshot figure unreliable for analysis. We cannot characterise current implied volatility with precision, but the directional move from tonight's event is unambiguous in a thin after-hours session.
Gold at $4,684 (stale, 4.2 hours old) is the cleanest signal available. CFTC positioning at only the 17th percentile means this is emphatically not a crowded trade. In our supply shock scenario, gold targets $5,500+. The risk/reward on long gold, already our highest-conviction expression, has just widened further in our favour. Bitcoin at $69,318 (live) is essentially flat, which is consistent with crypto's current regime as a risk-correlated asset sitting in the middle of its $62K-$76K range. Expect correlation with equities to re-establish sharply if this escalates into active military exchange.
Equities at 22x P/E with real yields at 1.99% (DFII10, FRED) were already structurally mispriced for a world without this shock. The ES crowded long at the 98th percentile CFTC percentile is coiled for a cascade. SPY's 4.2-hour-old print of $654.06 is stale and markets are currently closed, after-hours price action should be monitored but treated with caution given thin liquidity.
What This Means
Our scenario distribution just shifted materially. The 20% geopolitical supply shock tail, which previously anchored the extreme end of our probability tree, now demands a probability in the 30-40% range. That mechanically raises the combined bearish scenario probability from 64% to approximately 75%+. The soft landing scenario (previously 22%) compresses toward 10-15%. The market is still pricing approximately 55% soft landing probability. That gap is now grotesque, not merely optimistic.
The stagflation deepening thesis no longer requires patient accumulation of confirming data. Tonight's threat is a potential regime-break event that could compress months of macro deterioration into days. The April 10 CPI print, already the single most important near-term event, now arrives in a completely different geopolitical context.
Positioning Implications
Long gold / short equities remains the highest-conviction pair, and tonight raises the urgency. Watch for WTI futures opening, the first clean price signal will come from Brent and WTI on Asian open. Any confirmed move above $120 in WTI on fresh data would be the single most important confirmation of this scenario materialising.
Explore these indicators together: Chart WTI Crude Oil, Household Financial Obligations Ratio, and 3 more on the Indicators Dashboard