Weekly KAOS, 7/17/26
Hormuz Blares, Oil Yawns, and Warsh Waits
Welcome to the Weekly KAOS — UrbanKaoboy’s end-of-week roundup covering Macro and Geopolitics, where I try and tease out the most impactful bits of the week.
Themes of the Week
A third straight week of Hormuz strikes and crude still won’t hold a bid, benign Disinflation battles a hot Philly Fed for the Warsh Fed’s ear, and a SCOTUS Tariff ruling could hand China a windfall
A third straight week of live fire in and around the Strait of Hormuz still can’t put a lasting bid under Oil, benign Disinflation and a red-hot Philly Fed print pull the Warsh Fed in opposite directions, and a looming SCOTUS ruling on Tariffs threatens to hand China a windfall.
There’s an old truth about car alarms: the more often one shrieks across the parking lot, the fewer heads it turns — and that indifference is precisely the moment the car actually gets stolen. That was the Oil tape this week. We got a THIRD round of US strikes on Iran, Tehran declaring the Strait “closed until further notice,” US forces boarding ships, and fresh blasts on Iranian bridges — the alarm blaring at full volume — and yet crude spiked on each headline only to bleed right back toward flat. As I flagged in last week’s KAOS, the market has quietly shifted from pricing disruption to pricing durability, and this week it doubled down on that bet.
Meanwhile the Warsh Fed inherits its own two-sided trap — genuine Disinflation on one side, a factory print that just ripped to a four-year high on the other — and that is the KAOS he has to price in his first act.
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