As we discussed yesterday, this ceasefire has a measurable daily report card — the transit traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
How's it going? In the 36 hours since the ceasefire was announced, approximately 8 vessels have transited the Strait.
Before the war, roughly 135 vessels passed through daily.
That's 4% of normal traffic, under a ceasefire conditioned on the "COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING" of the Strait.
Every vessel that did pass went through the IRGC-controlled corridor.
No major oil companies. No blue-chip shipping operators. War-risk insurance has not reopened. And 3,200 vessels with 20,000 crew members remain stuck west of the Strait.
This all according to the maritime intelligence company, Windward.
And Trump is already calling out the lack of compliance, less than two full days into a two-week agreement.
So, the ceasefire has given markets another relief rally (each of the past six weeks has tended to be shorter than the last), but the data underneath is unchanged. The energy supply shock continues.
Now, we talked yesterday about the giant leap in model capabilities from Anthropic's recent model, Mythos. It can find and exploit security flaws in software (including operating systems like Windows) that no human has ever discovered, and it can do it faster than humans can defend against it.
Anthropic themselves said they're alarmed that the world is building toward superhuman AI without adequate safety measures in place. Again, they've taken it to the U.S. government and they've convened the top tech and security firms to build defense against it.
And tonight, it was reported that Scott Bessent and Jerome Powell called in the heads of the major banks on Tuesday for a private meeting.
Impromptu meetings of this group are rare, and historically have a common thread: crisis (Long-Term Capital Management, 9/11, GFC, 2018 crisis of confidence, Covid, Silicon Valley Bank).
In this case, it's said to have just been a discussion of the risks to their systems (and the financial system) from the capabilities of this model (and others like it to come).
The meeting alone should be reason enough to buy some Treasuries, dollars and gold (safe-havens).
