Today’s Strait of Hormuz Mystery: Where Did the Oil Go?

Energy Secretary Chris Wright claimed last week that the United States helped move 15 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday. He also claimed that the average daily oil exports were more than eight million barrels over a seven-day period.

But a consistent gap has emerged between the Trump administration’s claims and industry firms’ findings, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Kpler, a ship-tracking firm, estimated that the U.S. moved a daily average of roughly 2.3 million barrels of crude and oil products in August. Huax, another tracker, placed average daily exports at between two million and five million barrels. For context, before the U.S. attacked Iran, an average of 20 million barrels of oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz every single day.

Vortexa, another tanker tracker, found that a seven-day average peaked at 9.2 million barrels—a number far closer to the administration’s claims. But its 28-day average was roughly six million barrels. Clearly, the number can vary greatly depending on what specific dates are selected.

Wright has claimed that private data firms are undercounting the number of ships passing covertly through the strait, but one expert explained why that’s not likely.

Rory Johnston, a founder of Commodity Context, an oil-market research firm, told The Wall Street Journal that the firms tracking tankers had all found similar numbers. “You’d expect someone to have figured out a way to validate the White House numbers if there was a way,” Johnston said. “As of yet, I haven’t seen anyone do it.”

Since the beginning of the war, industry firms have struggled to monitor the passage of ships that are forced to “go dark” and silence their marine radio tracking systems. Still, the numbers the Trump administration is presenting aren’t supported by any information from the companies that are actually loading the ships.

The London Stock Exchange Group estimated the amount of crude and oil being loaded onto ships in the Persian Gulf was about 1.9 million barrels a day—down from 4.4 million barrels a day in July.

Wright has also insisted that the United States has gained full control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Donald Trump made some eyebrow-raising changes to his stock portfolio in June.

The president reshuffled his investment accounts, rotating between stocks and bonds in exchanges that totalled between $78.1 million and $263.1 million, according to a financial disclosure released August 22.

The disclosure does not reveal the true value of Trump’s portfolio, as it does not list the rates at which Trump bought or sold stock, or the quantity that he owns. However, it does indicate that the president made numerous investments in multiple companies that are currently in business with his administration.

Trump made more than 1,000 stock trades in June, according to the filing. The single largest transaction was an offloading of shares of a Vanguard exchange traded fund, totalling between $5 million and $25 million in a June 22 sale.

The other major expenditures were related to financial institutions. Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million of Berkshire Hathaway, and similar amounts in credit card companies Visa and Mastercard, as well as Cintas, an Ohio-based business supply firm.

He bought between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of SpaceX some 11 days after its initial public offering, despite the fact that the Elon Musk-led company is teed up to make billions of dollars through government contracts for satellite production.

Trump spent between $250,000 and $500,000 on Boeing stock, the same day that the Navy awarded the aerospace manufacturer a multimillion dollar government contract for its P-8A training system.

The president also invested in Palantir (which earlier this month won a $10 billion Army software contract), Meta (whose subsidiary Scale AI was awarded $500 million from the Pentagon in May), Broadcom (which received $970 million in March to support the military’s cloud services), and Nvidia (which is projected to make more than $1 trillion in revenue from its electronic chip trade this year after Trump green-lit its sale in the Chinese market in January).

The White House has repeatedly rebuked ethical concerns surrounding Trump’s expenditures. In May, spokesman Davis Ingle told CNBC plainly that there “are no conflicts of interest,” and that Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children.

“President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public—which is why they overwhelmingly reelected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media,” Ingle said at the time.

Gary, Indiana, has been without electricity for nearly two weeks after a powerful storm hit the area, closing businesses, closing schools, ruining food, stopping gas pumps, and causing food lines.

“We’re at day twelve, and twelve days is too long for families to be without power,” said the city’s mayor Eddie Melton in a video message Sunday. He’s urging the Northern Indiana Public Service Company, or NIPSCO, to restore power to all of the city’s residents by the end of Tuesday, he told residents.

“Twelve days is too long for parents to worry about their children, and for businesses to lose revenue, and for families to wonder when the relief is finally going to come. Today, I want the people of Gary to know this. I want you to know that I share their frustration,” Melton said.

At one point, there were nearly 374,500 power outages in the area, The Guardian reports, with that number dropping to 14,500 by Sunday and 10,187 by Monday. Gary has a population estimated at 67,289, with its metro area estimated at 680,661 according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

While most schools reopened in the city Monday (Gary started school on August 6) after a nearly two-week break, they opened on a two-hour delay. Melton said that “NIPSCO has so much more work to do. We’ve pushed them to do more and do it faster.” Local residents have sued the utility provider, blaming it for failing to trim trees that disabled power lines.

“This situation was predictable. It was obvious and it was preventable,” Otto Shragal, an attorney with the Allen Law Group, told The Guardian. Indiana Governor Mike Braun also blamed NIPSCO, telling Inside INdiana Business that the utility “needs to pick up the pace, because we’ve given them National Guard help, all of our agencies.”

One-third of Gary’s residents are under the poverty line, and have endured these conditions since August 11. The city is majority-Black in a state where Republicans control the legislature and governorship, and have long neglected the city by giving it meager state funding and blocking measures that would have expanded the municipality’s tax base.

Braun said on Friday that he “formally requested an expedited major disaster declaration for individual and public assistance for 54 counties from FEMA,” which, if granted, would “mean significantly more resources to accelerate Indiana’s recovery from the recent severe weather.” A state fund is reportedly providing emergency aid grants of up to $5,000, and last week, President Trump declared a state of emergency for Indiana counties affected by the severe storms.

Local celebrities Keith Lee, a food critic, and Indiana Pacers player Tyrese Haliburton are co-hosting an event to distribute relief supplies along with the Salvation Army, ACE Hardware, and Gary officials outside of the city’s Roosevelt Pavilion Monday, joining several other local aid efforts. Hopefully, all of those along with full restoration of power can ease residents’ difficulties in the short-term, as cleanup and repairs could take many months.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent struggled to explain how the Trump administration’s vague, toothless threat of more sanctions against Iran—which the president is calling an “economic D-Day”—was anything like the actual D-Day. 

Bessent held a Monday afternoon press conference to make himself known. 

“Beginning today … Treasury and other agencies will tighten the noose and block every potential source of revenue that funds the IRGC and the evil Iranian regime. We are enforcing a zero leakage approach; there will be no minimal breathing space for the regime to rebuild its capacity to inflict terror against America and the world,” he said.  

The secondary sanctions, which target countries that do trade with Iran, are aimed at digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. 

Yet Bessent wavered when asked about the details behind his aggressive claims, acknowledging that the “economic D-Day” was more of a warning than anything else.

When asked twice if his sanctions would target China or oft-mentioned Chinese banks accused of facilitating transactions for Iran, he had no direct answer, saying that the sanction recipients “know who they are.” 

He avoided specifics entirely for the rest of the questioning period. 

“You said the president is calling world leaders with specific asks, and that there is a defined timeline,” a reporter from CBS asked. “Who is he calling, and what are the asks?”

“We’re not gonna name names. We’ve already seen some results.… As you all know, the president is quite persuasive, and we are following his calls up with calls from the State Department and from the U.S. Treasury … telling the leaders, and the countries, and the entities exactly what we expect. And the timelines,” he equivocated. “And I would expect that very quickly, if they do not respond, then you will see the ramifications of their actions.”

“You described this as an economic D-Day, but D-Day wasn’t a threat of an invasion, and the U.S. didn’t give a timeline to Germany,” another reporter followed up. “So why not impose the sanctions today?”

“We are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behavior. Why would I want to blow up the global financial system? We believe that it is important to level set and give people a cure period, but they should know that that will move very quickly and that we are serious,” Bessent said, although it’s unclear how he plans on demonstrating that seriousness without any clear timeline for the sanctions. 

“Secondary sanctions are a very powerful tool.… The reason we are able to use secondary sanctions is because we do not take their use lightly,” he concluded. “So we believe that a warning shot and a level set of expectations is appropriate, and if people do not want to meet our expectations, then we expect, and they should expect, that they will leave the dollar system.” 

It seems like the Trump administration rolled out Bessent for tough talk and unspecified threats because they are running out of options. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for nearly 200 days, and Iran has already dealt with U.S. sanctions for 47 years. Why would this empty show of economic force change anything? 

Donald Trump’s administration has a new plan to turn the U.S. immigration system into a moneymaking scheme, ensuring that legal pathways to citizenship are out of reach for low-income immigrants.

The Department of Homeland Security proposed a new rule Monday that would establish a $103,265 fee for immigrants petitioning for a H-1B worker visa.

The proposed fee would be applied to all H-1B visa petitioners, including those already in the United States, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

“This fee would serve as a dedicated revenue mechanism to help recover a portion of the federal government’s costs of administering the lawful immigration system,” according to a federal notice.

The money raised from the fee would be directed to DHS, the Department of Labor, the Department of State, and the Department of Justice. Clearly, the rule is designed as a deterrent as the fee is prohibitively expensive for all but the most affluent.

In June, a federal judge blocked Trump’s original $100,000 H-1B visa fee for employers, finding that the fee was an illegal tax on businesses. It’s not clear why this new proposal wouldn’t be subject to a similar adjudication, as only Congress has the authority to impose taxes—not the president.

Trump has continued to undermine America’s ability to attract and retain talent from other countries. The administration’s racist replacement theories are accomplishing little other than to make our nation poorer and sicker. Meanwhile, one study estimates that H-1B visa holders who arrived between 1990 and 2020 were responsible for 30 percent to 50 percent of all productivity growth in the U.S. economy during that period—as well as spurring wage growth for native workers.