Global Capital Faces Supply Shocks and Policy Uncertainty

On July 20, the conflict between the U.S. and Iran escalated further. Iran announced it would cease to comply with the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding and warned that if U.S. military actions continued, it would enter a full-scale offensive phase. The U.S. has conducted airstrikes against Iran for the ninth consecutive night and has deployed additional F-16s, F-35s, and aerial refueling aircraft to the Middle East. Iran also claimed to have targeted U.S. military positions in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan, with Iranian media describing the shipping volume in the Strait of Hormuz as having "dropped to zero."

This means that the market needs to reassess not just the short-term fluctuations in oil prices, but also the "flow risks" in the global energy supply chain. When both the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Mandeb are at risk of obstruction, Middle Eastern oil-producing countries can only partially replace maritime capabilities by using alternative pipelines. Iraq has begun exporting oil via routes through Syria, reflecting that regional countries are accelerating the establishment of a "de-Hormuzification" backup system, but these alternative routes themselves remain exposed to missile, drone, and infrastructure attack risks.

More notably, Iran has publicly identified Middle Eastern AI infrastructure as a potential target for strikes for the first time. This indicates that the spillover of the conflict has extended from traditional oil and gas facilities to data centers, power, desalination, and computing networks. For the market, this will have two layers of impact: first, energy prices may be transmitted to the AI supply chain through electricity and cooling costs; second, capital expenditures in AI, which were originally viewed as a long-term growth engine, will be incorporated into geopolitical risk discount models, potentially leading to adjustments in valuation logic.

Meanwhile, Federal Reserve Chairman Waller is advocating for a communication framework with fewer forward guidance signals, and the market has even seen the emergence of a tool called "WarshGPT" that analyzes his historical statements using AI models. While bond market traders generally believe that there will be no changes in July, they have significantly raised pricing for a 25 basis point rate hike in September or October. The core logic behind this is that energy shocks and AI investment demand may make inflation more persistent than what the monthly CPI indicates.

The market is simultaneously trading two scenarios that have rarely coexisted in the past: the risk in the Strait of Hormuz is driving up energy and shipping costs; the Federal Reserve is regaining a hawkish narrative, and transparency is decreasing. When these two forces overlap, what is truly being repriced is not just a one-time increase in oil prices, but the potential upward shift in the global capital cost center. For risk assets, the sources of volatility in such an environment will increasingly stem from the resonance of "policy unpredictability + energy supply uncertainty," rather than from single economic data points.

In the short term, the market will closely monitor three observation points: the actual recovery of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, whether the Houthis announce a blockade of the Strait of Mandeb, and the trend of U.S. Treasury yields before the July FOMC meeting. If energy risks do not cool down and the two-year U.S. Treasury yield remains high, global capital's risk appetite for overvalued technology and highly leveraged assets will continue to face pressure.

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