Vitol

No, but that margin is taken by the traders.

Shell, Total Energy, the Vitol, the Glencore.

These are the guys cashing in the difference.

The utilities in Europe could be contracting.

That will then help the smelters because the smelters' cathode will be worth so much more.

And some of these traders, all of the big traders, Traffi, Glencore, Vitol, Mercuria, Gumver, have books of cathode and concentrates and then can leverage those things to complement each other.

If the tariff comes in that that situation, you know, it will help the smelters because their cathode will be worth a lot more.

And, you know, push up the prices, which could could help certainly Chinese smelters as well because of the free metal they get.

surpassing the tanker wars of the 1980s when Iran and Iraq attacked commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf.

There's really not quite enough shipping to go around, according to Russell Hardy, chief executive officer of Vitol Group, the world's biggest independent oil trader.

We've had pretty parabolic pricing.

The surge is a fresh complication for an oil market that has spent months adapting to the historic disruption caused by the Iran war.

And as a result of that, crude prices have still only got 200 bucks.

And if you look at the comments from Aramco and Vitol, the largest oil trader and the largest oil company in the world in just the last week, have said that if we don't have 13 to 14 million barrels per day of oil coming out of the Middle East, we will be at 200 bucks oil, not at 103 or 105 where we are.

So shipping has played a critical role in getting oil out of the Middle East, even in the current circumstances where 11 ships have been hit in the last 10 days.

uh so seafarers and ship owners are putting their assets seafarers their lives and ship owners their assets they're putting them at risk going into the water zone areas to bring the oil out so shipping first of all is strategic this is something the realization has hit people in the last eight months which is quite surprising for me being in shipping for the last 38 years that shipping was always strategic has been strategic nothing has changed from eight months ago to today but the realization has gone up the chain from top to bottom everybody knows now that the tanker goes in and gets the oil off but what is now a freight Freight used to be 3% to 5% of the delivered cost of the oil.

And then we wouldn't be drawing down the strategic petroleum reserves here and in Europe if there was this, this glut.

There was so much, so-- there was such a glut of oil Why would we need to be drawing down the strategic reserves? Also, listen to what the CEO of Aramco, Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company says, "We've lost 3 billion barrels in this catastrophic war already." You can listen to what Vitol's CEO, one of the largest independent trading companies, uh, for oil, what they say as well about the, uh, they, they could see prices of oil hitting $200 a barrel.

If you look right now at dated Brent spot price, meaning what's the price to buy today, not the futures contract.

So when we talk about what's the price of crude when you hear the price of Brent or WTI, we're talking about a futures contract to purchase in December.