Key Points

• WTI (CL=F) surged as much as 13%  before settling at $110.22 and Brent (BZ=F) rose 6.44% to $107.67  Thursday after Trump's Wednesday address vowed further Iran strikes

• TP ICAP analyst Scott Shelton warned  that if the war extends past the weekend ceasefire, oil markets will  hit demand destruction levels before mid-to-late April

• Jet fuel prices have surged more  than 100% in one month, hitting airlines with an estimated $400 million  per carrier quarterly expense hit

West  Texas Intermediate crude futures (CL=F) surged 11.10% to $110.22 per  barrel as of 11:33 a.m. ET Thursday, marking the second time since the  war began in late February that WTI has crossed the psychologically and  economically critical $110 threshold. June futures for international  benchmark Brent crude (BZ=F) rose more than 6.44% to $107.67 per barrel,  with intraday peaks reaching $107.79 during the morning London session  before partially pulling back. At their session highs, WTI had gained as  much as 13% from the prior session before retreating from the extreme  peak as Iranian state news agency IRNA reported that Iran and Oman were  drafting a protocol to monitor Strait of Hormuz transit — a headline  that briefly gave the market an excuse to trim the most extreme gains  without reversing the underlying bullish trend.

The  numbers in isolation are extraordinary. WTI has now rallied from  approximately $65 per barrel before the war began on February 28 to $110  on Thursday — a 69% surge in approximately five weeks. Brent crude  surged more than 60% during the month of March alone, which Bank of  America described as the biggest single-month percentage gain in Brent  crude prices since futures trading launched in the 1980s. That is not  the biggest monthly gain since 2020, or since 2008, or since the first  Gulf War. That is the biggest monthly gain since the instrument has  existed as a tradable financial product. The scale of what has happened  to global energy markets in the past five weeks has no modern precedent,  and Thursday's 11% single-session WTI move is not an outlier in this  environment — it is the continuing manifestation of a supply shock whose  full economic consequences have not yet been fully priced or felt.

The  prompt oil price has hit a record premium to next-month delivery — a  condition known as extreme backwardation — reflecting the market's  judgment that physical crude is desperately scarce right now and that  traders are willing to pay a massive premium for immediate delivery  versus future delivery. Extreme backwardation of this magnitude is the  oil market's most reliable signal of acute physical supply shortage, and  it reinforces every analytical argument for why prices are not simply  speculative — they are reflecting real-world supply disruption of  historical severity.

What Trump Actually Said — And Why the Market Responded With an 11% Surge Rather Than a Relief Rally

The  market's 11% initial surge on Thursday was a direct reaction to Trump's  Wednesday evening national address, which delivered the opposite of  what oil traders had positioned for following Tuesday's optimistic  signals. On Tuesday, Trump told White House reporters that the war would  end within "two or three weeks, whether we have a deal or not" and  appeared to signal a unilateral US military withdrawal regardless of  diplomatic resolution. Oil prices fell on that comment, with Brent  briefly dipping below $100 per barrel for the first time in a week as  traders priced in an imminent end to the Strait of Hormuz disruption.  That optimism was systematically dismantled over the next 24 hours.

Trump's  Wednesday address ran 19 minutes and contained language that oil  markets interpreted as unambiguous escalation rather than wind-down. The  president said the US would "hit" Iran "extremely hard" over the next  two to three weeks, attributed the oil price surge to "the Iranian  regime launching deranged terror attacks against commercial oil  tankers," and framed the US position on the Strait of Hormuz in terms  that shocked energy analysts: he essentially told America's  oil-dependent allies that reopening the Strait was their problem to  handle, not Washington's. Political risk analyst Giles Alston at Oxford  Analytica described the shift directly on CNBC's Squawk Box Asia: "It's  becoming increasingly clear that the US position on what you do to get  your oil out of and through the Straits of Hormuz is now something which  Washington has largely washed its hands off. This is now something for  those who take oil through the Strait to sort out for themselves."