The world’s energy artery has developed a lethal clot. Help is apparently on the way, but it could be days or more before it arrives.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday that the US government will soon make a “series of announcements” meant to bring order to oil shipping in the Gulf, where traffic has come to a near standstill since the US and Israel struck Iran, prompting Tehran to threaten attacks on any ship that tries to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Wall Street analysts have warned that the immediacy of the shutdown is such that oil production could see massive cuts for every day the situation goes unresolved.

Not Pulling Their Freight

Bessent told CNBC that the administration will reach out to ship owners and insurance brokers “over the coming days” about government-backed insurance guarantees President Donald Trump authorized on Tuesday. Trump said the US International Development Finance Corp. will offer ships insurance at a “reasonable price” after maritime insurers began swiftly canceling war policies.

For now, little is moving. S&P Global Commodities at Sea said Wednesday that an average of 135 vessels crossed the Strait of Hormuz daily in February. This week, that has dropped to the single digits. In normal times, all that traffic shuttles roughly 15 million barrels of crude through the Strait each day. The backlog from the current quagmire, analysts warn, could soon have serious consequences. While Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s largest producer, has “abundant storage,” according to JPMorgan, the oil-producing alliance’s second-largest producer, Iraq, and its fifth-largest, Kuwait, are a very different story. Iraq, which has already cut production by 1.5 million per day or roughly in half, has days before its storage is full, the bank’s analysts wrote. Storage in Kuwait, they estimate, will be at capacity in roughly two weeks. Production losses could total 3 million barrels per day by the end of this week, 4 million if the conflict lasts another week, and 5 million by day eighteen. That would add to the pressure that has pushed international benchmark Brent crude up 12% to $81.40 a barrel since Saturday:

• Analysts at Citi said Brent should trade between $80 and $90 for the next week. Along with Wood Mackenzie and Bernstein, the bank said its most extreme scenarios (a prolonged conflict or Iranian strikes on infrastructure) put Brent at $120. ​
• Already, Wall Street is forecasting that the impact of the Hormuz closure and related supply issues will linger for months, even if there’s a resolution.

Part-Time Job: Massive oil tankers stranded in Hormuz could become floating storage containers to help cover their own operating and capital needs, S&P said Wednesday. Some are also “seeking short-term employment” taxiing cargo within the region, the agency’s analysts wrote. One tanker run by Dynacom, they added, got a $3.75 million payday to ferry cargo between Jubail and Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia.

Crypto’s making a comeback. Bitcoin reached $73,000, recouping about $10,000 in value from recent lows. No. 2 crypto Ethereum and the broader market perked up in turn.

About $225 million flowed into US spot bitcoin ETFs on Tuesday, adding to more than $450 million the day before. No funds saw outflows, according to SoSoValue data. Outflows from spot bitcoin ETFs piled up to $9 billion from mid-October to late February, Bloomberg Intelligence found, but inflows are starting to turn the tide. Investors have poured ~$1.7 billion into the ETFs since late February.

Perpetual open interest, meanwhile, notched its largest daily increase since July, Glassnode found, signifying an expansion in leveraged bets, which had been liquidated en masse in October.

‘Buy the Dip’ Behavior

Bitcoin’s bounce could be partly due to timing. Bitcoin’s four-year cycle may be moving to its next stage after hitting bottom, VanEck CEO Jan van Eck told CNBC. The four-year cycle can also act as a self-fulfilling prophecy to some degree, as investors who think digital assets have hit rock bottom look to profit from its return to glory.

Geopolitical events may be helping to drive the rebound. Investors seeking out decentralized financial options amid global turmoil have come to see the assets as an alternative safe haven. Even if that’s not the case, crypto’s resilience through the start of war between the US, Israel and Iran in the past week could further boost investors’ confidence.

Washington, meanwhile, is amplifying that confidence with recent pro-crypto moves:

• Kraken said yesterday that it had become the first crypto exchange to be granted access to the Fed’s payment networks, including its settlement system Fedwire. That puts Kraken on par with major banks. The Bank Policy Institute, which represents many of the US’s biggest banks, wrote that it was “deeply concerned” about how the update played out.
• President Trump seemed to take crypto companies’ side over big banks’ in a social media post Tuesday, writing that banks were “threatening and undermining” the Genius Act and holding the Clarity Act hostage. Shares of Coinbase, whose CEO pushed back on the Clarity Act’s restrictions around stablecoin rewards, jumped about 15% Wednesday.

Fragile Footing: While a confluence of factors is fueling renewed crypto confidence (and higher prices), the new floor could always fall out from under the sector, which, despite talk of its possible safe-haven status, is still a volatile investment. The sector is sensitive to geopolitical news, which has reached torrential levels lately. Still, the White House’s backing is a strong force in crypto’s favor, especially if crypto companies get the Clarity Act they want.

In Sony’s popular video game Ghost of Yōtei, Atsu searches for six outlaws on her quest for revenge. If they made it out of the realm of PlayStation 5, she may have trouble catching them.

In a major shakeup for Sony’s strategy, the company is focusing on the console and pulling back from PC ports, according to a Bloomberg report on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the company’s plans. Ghost of Yotei and action game Saros, which is expected to launch next month, will be exclusive to the company’s console, PlayStation 5, instead of being shared with PC users.

Sony isn’t scrapping its PC releases completely: Bloomberg noted that online games such as Marathon will still hit multiple platforms, and two games created by external developers but published by PlayStation are still slated for a PC release this year. But, at least for now, gone are the days when gamers could bet on their favorite single-player PlayStation games coming to the device of their choice.

Pricey Payoff

The U-turn on PC releases brings Sony back to a pre-pandemic strategy that treated PlayStation exclusives as somewhat sacred, and put pressure on customers who wanted to get their hands on those games to buy the company’s console. But starting in 2020, Sony began bringing hits like The Last of Us to the masses via PC ports. The tradeoff? The company had to let its IP onto other firms’ hardware.

Sony has now decided the broader audience that PC offers isn’t worth giving up that control. Neither Sony nor PlayStation responded to requests for comment.

Sony is doubling down on its own box even as consoles become more expensive to develop and sell:

• “The average price paid for a new unit of video game hardware in the US during November 2019 was $235. In November 2025, it was $439,” ‪Mat Piscatella‬, Circana video game industry analyst, wrote on Bluesky. “3.9 million units of video game hardware sold in the US in November 2019. In November 2025, it was 1.6 million.”
• When asked how these companies would lower prices with tariffs and an increase in bill of materials (BOM), Piscatella‬ said, “They likely cannot and will not.”

Mario Move: Sony’s shift is looking very Nintendo-like. The gaming rival has largely reserved its marquee franchises for customers with Nintendo’s hardware, the Switch.