One of the world’s most watched banks just told clients it cannot model crude oil any more. That sentence is rarer than a $50 barrel. It is also the closest Wall Street has come to saying out loud what traders have whispered for months: nobody knows how this war ends, and the old price rules no longer hold.
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On 17 September 2026, JPMorgan’s commodities team published a note that stopped other desks in their tracks. For the first time since the United States and Israel opened the campaign against Iran in late February, the bank said it has no baseline view on oil. “We simply don’t know how to model the endgame,” the analysts wrote. Reuters, Bloomberg and later RT all carried the same line. Reuters report · RT write-up
That is not a normal bank sentence. Big houses live by baselines. They sell them to funds, treasuries and governments. When JPMorgan walks away from one, it is admitting that politics has eaten the spreadsheet.
The red lines that were supposed to stop the war
At the start of the fighting, the bank’s team, led by Natasha Kaneva, assumed Washington would not cross certain pain points. Oil above $100 a barrel. Gasoline near $5 a gallon. The 10-year Treasury note above 5 percent. Those were treated as tripwires. Cross them, the thinking went, and the White House would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and walk toward a deal.
Six months later those lines have been crossed. Brent has spent long stretches above $100. US regular gasoline printed $4.37 a gallon on 16 September, according to AAA, up from about $2.98 just before the late-February strikes. National diesel hit a record $6.31 a gallon with stocks at historic lows heading into winter. The 10-year yield touched 5 percent this past week. None of that produced a lasting exit. Planet Today on the $4.37 gallon
“Six months later, many of those lines have been crossed, yet the exit strategy is less clear, not more.”
— JPMorgan commodities note, as reported 17 September 2026
A short-lived June deal to reopen Hormuz collapsed within weeks. Fighting resumed. Trump has since said he faces a “big decision” on Iran and has used the word “annihilate” about the Iranian government. He has also told reporters he does not expect the war to end before the November midterms, while promising that prices will fall “right after the election.” Markets hear both sentences and price neither with confidence.
This is the JPM oil report everyone's talking about. pic.twitter.com/JBdM28FkjZ
— HFI Research (@HFI_Research) September 18, 2026
Why the early forecasts missed by a mile
In early April, JPMorgan warned that if Hormuz stayed blocked into mid-May, crude could reach $150. Oil did spike toward $125 and then settled near $100 even as disruptions continued. The bank also said OECD inventories would hit “operational minimums” in May, after which prices would rise in a steep curve rather than a straight line. Stocks did fall — globally by about 555 million barrels since the war began, by the bank’s later count — but they did not collapse the way the model required.
What absorbed the shock was not only stored oil. It was people and factories using less. JPMorgan now says demand destruction did more work than inventory draws. Global use has run roughly 4.4 million barrels a day below year-ago levels in some of the bank’s figures. That is the quiet part of the story. Prices did not go vertical because the poorest buyers left the market first.
The International Energy Agency’s September Oil Market Report made the same point in colder language. World oil demand is now expected to fall by 2.5 million barrels a day in 2026 — 940,000 barrels a day more than the August estimate. The IEA says losses sit heaviest in middle distillates and petrochemical feedstocks, especially in Asia, and that 2026–27 looks like “essentially a lost period” for demand growth. IEA Oil Market Report, September 2026
JPMorgan’s own fair-value estimate for Brent in September sits near $90. The market has been trading around $103–$106. The gap is the war premium: extra dollars paid because more barrels could still vanish from the Gulf, the Red Sea or Saudi export lines.
Who gets pushed out first
Petroleum geologist Art Berman has been blunt about the order of pain. Wealthy American drivers feel the pump. They are not the first to leave.
“The first participants forced out of the market are not wealthy American consumers. They are fertilizer buyers in Africa, trucking firms in Pakistan, factories in Bangladesh, and households across import-dependent economies.”
— Art Berman
High oil plus a weak local currency is a trap. Import bills rise in dollars. The local money falls. Food and fuel become dearer in the same week. That loop does not show up in a New York trading pit the way a $10 move in Brent does, but it is how an energy shock travels through the real world. Berman and others have also argued that some Gulf capacity may be damaged for years, not weeks. That is a physical claim, not a political slogan, and it is one reason a simple “war ends, price falls” story may be too neat. Berman’s September essay
This is where official talk and street talk split. Official talk stresses resilience, strategic stocks, and US output. Street talk in import-heavy countries is about factories going dark for a few hours, fertilizer that never arrives, and bus fares that jump overnight. Both can be true at once. The rich world can “muddle through” while the thin-margin world is already rationing.
This pattern is old. The scale is not
Demand destruction is not a new trick. After the 1979 shock tied to the Iranian Revolution, US oil use fell nearly 20 percent over four years. In 2008 crude ran from about $90 in January to $147 in July. The spike itself helped smash consumer spending and is still listed by some analysts as an under-counted cause of the crash that followed. Europe’s 2022 gas break with Russia cut consumption about 20 percent from pre-2022 levels by late 2025. When prices later eased, factories had already shut or moved energy-heavy work abroad. The bill outlived the headline price.
The 2026 shock is larger in barrels than many of those episodes. Gulf flows near 20 million barrels a day used to pass Hormuz. Disruption estimates this year have run around 10 million barrels a day at the worst points. That is why models built on “a few weeks of tension” broke. It is also why some alternative writers treat the war as a permanent reset of the growth model, not a pause. Mainstream desks still talk about a 2027 rebound. Skeptical energy writers talk about a higher floor and a slower world. The data so far supports pain without a clean crash — so far.
Politics the models cannot hold
Traders are not only watching missiles. They are watching a US election calendar. Trump has tied cheaper fuel to a win and to the period after November. He has also kept the door open to a much harder blow against Tehran. Those two messages do not live in the same forecast cell.
Washington still frames the campaign as a mix of self-defense, freedom of navigation and pressure on a hostile government. Tehran frames it as aggression and answers with mines, drones, proxies and a claim that the Gulf is not safe for its enemies. Israel is a co-fighter, not a spectator. Vice President JD Vance has said US Middle East policy cannot serve Israel first — a line that landed in the same week as talk of a large new arms package and record US pump prices. Readers can weigh that against the joint strike record since February. Vance on “Israel first”
On the other side of the ledger, critics of Tehran point to attacks on shipping, the June deal that died, and the risk that a nuclear-capable rival sits on the world’s oil tap. Critics of Washington point to six months of crossed “red lines,” rising Treasury yields, and a war whose end date now seems to sit after an American vote. A Swiss reading does not pick a hero. It notes that both capitals have reasons to keep fighting and both have reasons to stop, and that oil is the scoreboard the public can see.
Some voices go further. They say the war is less about one regime than about who sets the rules for Gulf barrels, dollar clearing and tanker insurance. Others say it is personal, electoral and messy — a president who likes leverage, an Iranian leadership that believes time is on its side, and a market that has to price both. Conspiracy talk fills the gaps the note leaves open. The honest limit is this: JPMorgan did not claim a hidden plot. It claimed ignorance. That is rarer, and in some ways more unsettling.
This week’s tape: a pipeline, a hope, a still-high price
Late this week oil eased on hopes that flows could return through Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline after a drone strike. Brent still held above $100, near $103 in Friday afternoon London trade. Separate reporting has flagged Houthi pressure on Red Sea routes and Bab el-Mandeb as a second choke beside Hormuz. One front was already enough to break the baseline. A second front is why the bank will not rebuild it in a hurry. Houthi strikes and Saudi energy sites
US diesel at record highs before winter is the domestic tell. Inventories are thin. Seasonal demand is about to rise. If more Gulf or Red Sea barrels drop out, the next move is not a model. It is a queue at the rack and another step down in use by people who cannot pay.
What “no baseline” really means for readers
It means official comfort language — “contained,” “priced in,” “temporary” — is now weaker than the bank’s own memo. It means a $90 “fair value” and a $105 screen can both be right: one is the world without extra war risk, the other is the world we have. It means poor import nations are already performing the adjustment that rich nations still debate. And it means the next political speech about “winning” or “annihilating” will move the tape faster than any inventory table.
History says energy shocks do not end when the first ceasefire photo is taken. They end when ships, refineries, insurance and trust are rebuilt — or when demand has been crushed enough that the missing barrels no longer matter. JPMorgan will not pick which path we are on. That, more than any price target, is the news.
For related reading on how the same shock shows up at the American pump and in European energy bills, see Planet Today’s files on who owns the $4.37 gallon and Trump’s “economic D-Day” language on Iran.
Original source: “JPMorgan throws in towel on forecasting oil price,” RT Business, published 18 September 2026, 17:00 (updated 18:05). Full link: https://www.rt.com/business/645964-oil-price-us-middle-east/. Matching coverage the same news cycle: Reuters, 17 September 2026; Bloomberg, 17 September 2026.
Note for fact checkers: Price prints, IEA demand figures, AAA pump averages and named JPMorgan quotes are taken from published reports dated 16–18 September 2026 and the IEA September 2026 Oil Market Report. The JPMorgan note itself is a client research document summarized by news desks, not a public filing. Historical comparisons (1979, 2008, Europe 2022) are standard in energy writing and are analogies, not proof of a single cause. Claims about motives, midterm timing and “who the war serves” are contested political readings. This page sets them next to each other so the reader can judge. It does not replace primary documents.
Original article: JPMorgan Drops Oil Forecast as Iran War Has No Clear End on Planet Today 🚀
Automatically republished from the main blog.