Day 86 of the Hormuz crisis opens, for the first time, with a credible path to its end. Over the weekend President Trump said a deal with Iran is "largely negotiated," and mediators indicated an announcement could come within days. The emerging framework — reported consistently across Axios, the Financial Times, CNN and CBS — is a 60-day ceasefire extension under which the Strait of Hormuz reopens gradually, Iran is free to sell oil again, the United States eases its blockade of Iranian ports with the prospect of sanctions relief, and negotiations over Iran's enriched-uranium stockpile are deferred to a later stage. That deferral is the sequencing Tehran had insisted on all along.
The most concrete signal is physical rather than rhetorical: Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it authorised more than 30 vessels to transit the strait in a single 24-hour window, according to the state-affiliated Fars news agency relayed by CNN — a step-change from the near-zero open transits recorded since May 6. After three months in which the price tape swung daily on diplomatic mood music while no barrels actually moved, ships are moving.
Two cautions keep this short of a resolution, and we hold to them. The deal is not signed and has slipped before — Trump has repeatedly declared the conflict near its end only for talks to fall through. And the two sides are publicly contradicting each other on the central question of who controls the waterway: Iranian state media says Iran will continue to manage the strait and that it "will not return to its pre-war status," while Trump asserts Iran no longer controls access. The honest reading is therefore: closer to an exit than at any point since February 28, but unsigned, contested, and — because Gulf cargoes take roughly two months to reach end markets — still weeks away from delivering physical relief even if signed today. Crude had already priced much of the optimism: Brent settled $103.54 and WTI $96.60 on Friday, capping a week down more than 5% and more than 8% respectively, though Monday's US Memorial Day holiday meant no fresh print. Both remain more than 45% above their pre-war level, because prices have fallen on rising deal probability, not on supply returning.
The map widened on its own terms. This week's Latin America review surfaced an Andean cluster it had underweighted. ECUADOR enters on watch: a March 1 fire at the Esmeraldas refinery — the country's largest, at about 63% of national capacity — cut national refining by more than 60% and produced acute gasoline and diesel shortages in Quito, Guayaquil and Cuenca during May 8-13, before a fluid-catalytic-cracking-unit restart on May 15 began a recovery now targeting full capacity by June 2. PERU enters on watch on a different axis: the government issued a precautionary US$2 billion liquidity backstop for state oil company Petroperú rather than risk a supply break. Both are domestic-vulnerability stories aggravated by the Hormuz price shock, not pure cascades — and Peru's response, a fiscal firewall rather than physical queues, shows how the same price signal lands differently in different economies. Meanwhile Ukraine's long-range drone campaign has now halted or cut roughly a quarter of Russia's refining capacity, and Cuba (Day 19) and Bolivia (Day 20) continued as acute crises distinct from the strait.
This week also brought a methodology checkpoint. With the deal-track turning, the strait beginning to reopen, and Ecuador recovering, we re-audited the risk matrix against our concrete-consequence test and brought the share of "critical" ratings down from 46% to 31% — not by fiat, but by reclassifying rows (EU jet fuel, US and Australian aviation, India retail) where the threatened consequence has not in fact materialised. For the full matrix, the analyst outlook, and the complete timeline, see the Risk Analysis page (Issue #26).