Chris Martenson calls that the honest price in a dishonest market.
His reasoning: crude trades through dozens of financial players stacking paper contracts on a handful of physical barrels, so the headline number can be leaned on, a reading he owns as his own.
Sulfur has almost no paper market.
When it triples, something real is happening.
What's real is this.
Sulfur is a byproduct of refining sour crude, the heavy grade the Gulf pumps and America imports, and it feeds the sulfuric acid beneath copper mining, chip fabrication, and above all phosphate fertilizer.
Shut in Gulf fields and refineries and the loss doesn't stop at jet fuel.
Chris's forecast, and he's careful to call it one: an escalation that hits Gulf refining the way Ukraine has gutted Russia's would take out something like HALF the world's sulfur supply, and detonate through food prices, metals, and the entire AI buildout at once.
The asymmetry is what stayed with me after we stopped recording.
The upside of this whole pressure campaign, in his accounting, is that Iran might concede somewhat sooner at a negotiating table.
The downside is a global demand shock he compares to hitting a wall at fifty miles an hour.
Weighing those two against each other is the entire war in one sentence.
@chrismartenson
