Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,
Oil prices are tumbling as tankers stream out of the Strait of Hormuz, but most of that traffic is stranded vessels finally allowed to leave, not new supply heading in.
Iran struck a commercial ship near Oman this week even as the 60-day U.S.-Iran ceasefire holds and markets keep pricing in a supply glut.
The U.S. strategic petroleum reserve is at its lowest level in four decades, and China may resume buying once it stops selling off the cargoes it's offloading now.
Crude oil prices are in freefall after the United States and Iran agreed on a ceasefire, set to last 60 days. Traders expect the ceasefire to unleash an avalanche of crude, and indeed, tankers are leaving the Persian Gulf in growing numbers. And yet Iran just struck a commercial ship in Hormuz.
Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the ceasefire prompted huge discounts in available crude cargoes, noting how Angolan crude was selling at a $10 discount to dated Brent—for the first time in a decade. Not only this, but Chinese refiners were offering crude oil cargoes for sale, the publication wrote, citing unnamed traders.
“You actually get a discount to buy a barrel now versus a barrel tomorrow because of the weakness in the Asian pull on Middle Eastern grades,” Daan Struyven, co-head of global commodities at Goldman Sachs, told Bloomberg.
“Reopening is going well and quickly.”
This appears to be the general feeling in trading and analyst circles. Indeed, analysts were somewhat baffled by the speed with which oil prices dropped amid the reports of more tankers exiting the Strait of Hormuz loaded.
“The market has rebalanced through a meaningfully different mix of demand losses and inventory withdrawals than we initially assumed,” JP Morgan commodity analysts said, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.
ING, however, sounded a note of caution.
“The market is largely focused on the resumption of oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which continues to increase,” the Dutch bank’s commodity team wrote today.
“However, much of the increase reflects previously stranded vessels leaving the Persian Gulf. Vessel flows into the Gulf remain much more modest.”
Indeed, the Wall Street Journal also noted in its report that while there has been a strong rebound in tanker traffic out of Hormuz, it is made up of stranded vessels finally allowed to exit the chokepoint. Incoming tankers, however, are nowhere near outgoing numbers. The publication cited the chief executive of Phillips 66 as estimating some 90 to 100 million barrels set to leave the strait and adding, “Then the question is: Who will be brave enough to send ships back in? Will they be able to get insurance? How does that all play out?”
Interestingly, Bloomberg also focused on the stranded tankers now leaving the Strait of Hormuz as the basis for its prediction that a flood of crude is coming into the market. The suggestion here is that oil markets are about to flip from deficit to excess in a matter of days, which was immediately reflected in prices. “The market might be a little bit overenthusiastic of how quickly the supply side, particularly inventories, are going to stabilize,” TD Securities’ global head of commodity strategy Bart Melek told the Wall Street Journal.
The reported Iranian strike on a commercial vessel in Hormuz earlier this week could give those overenthusiastic market players a pause, but for now, there is nothing to suggest it. Oil benchmarks are set for a sharp weekly decline despite a slowdown in the price movement following the news.
“With the geopolitical risk premium once again creeping back into prices, markets will be watching intently to see if tanker traffic resumes or if these latest hurdles force producers to tap the brakes on planned production increases,” IG analyst Tony Sycamore said as quoted by Reuters.
There is also the matter of inventory refilling. As Bloomberg noted in its report, echoing analyst warnings, the world handled the Hormuz crisis by tapping oil in storage. China’s contribution to relative market balance was seen as particularly notable, since the world’s largest importer of crude could afford to reduce purchases by dipping into its massive oil inventory, reducing oil prices’ potential for skyrocketing. Yet with flows out of the Persian Gulf improving, Chinese refiners may start buying once again—presumably, after they sell all the cargoes they want to sell right now.
The U.S. also needs to refill, and rather urgently, because oil in storage is at levels low enough to start worrying some observers, with the strategic petroleum reserve sitting at the lowest level in four decades, lower than when it was in 2023, after the Biden administration released close to 200 million barrels. At the end of the week ending June 19, the SPR had 331.2 million barrels in it. The thing to remember about oil in storage, whether in the U.S. or anywhere else, is that not all of these barrels are actually available. There is a certain level of crude in the system that needs to be maintained in order for the system to keep working—the so-called minimum operational level.
So, it appears that a lot more oil is coming out of the Persian Gulf, and this is, naturally, weighing on prices. Yet there are doubts as to whether the rate of this outflow can be sustained over a longer period once the stranded ships clear out, which is potentially a booster for prices. The issue of insurance also looms large over the tanker market, as does the strength of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire.
Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 14:40Meta Platforms has instructed engineers in its Applied AI division to limit or restrict their use of Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex coding and agent tools, according to internal documents reviewed by The Information. The policy, driven by concerns over inadvertent model distillation, aims to prevent outputs from rival AI systems from contaminating Meta's own training data and model development processes for its Llama family of models (which, quite frankly, could only help).
The move reflects the increasingly zero-sum nature of frontier AI development, where companies aggressively protect the provenance and purity of their training data while seeking to reduce reliance on competitor tools. Internal guidelines referencing the restrictions date back to at least May, with the policy actively in effect as of late June. Meta has not publicly confirmed or commented on the directive.
According to the internal documents, strict limits have been placed on how engineers in the applied AI division can use the rival tools. The stated goal is to block "inadvertent distillation" of competitor model outputs into Meta's AI development pipeline. The scope is targeted: it focuses on engineers working directly on model building and applied AI initiatives rather than the entire engineering organization.
Claude Code from Anthropic and Codex from OpenAI are basically the industry standard now for professional developers engaged in agentic coding workflows. These desktop and app-based interfaces can plan, write, debug, and iterate on complex codebases, offering powerful assistance at relatively low individual subscription costs. That accessibility, however, has increased the potential surface area for the risks Meta is now seeking to contain.
What "Distillation" MeansModel distillation is a well-established technique in which outputs from a larger or more capable "teacher" model are used to train or improve a "student" model. In this instance, Meta is concerned that high-quality code suggestions, architectural recommendations, debugging logic, and reasoning traces generated by Claude or Codex could be incorporated - whether intentionally for productivity or accidentally through copied artifacts - into internal codebases, documentation, or synthetic training data.
The result would be a subtle transfer of competitor capabilities into Llama models. Beyond intellectual property exposure, the risk includes contamination of Meta's carefully curated training data pipelines and the creation of unintended dependencies on rival model behaviors. Secondary concerns involve proprietary Meta code and context being transmitted to external Anthropic and OpenAI servers during routine usage.
The move comes as Meta is locked in a high-stakes competition to close the capability gap with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google - while simultaneously constructing massive internal infrastructure. The company has publicly emphasized its desire to reduce dependence on third-party AI services for both cost and strategic autonomy reasons. Restricting these widely used coding tools sends a clear internal message: engineers should build with Meta tools and data wherever possible.
TestContributor Mon, 06/29/2026 - 14:20Authored by Matt Margolis via PJMedia.com,
It's been two years since Joe Biden's catastrophic debate against President Donald Trump, which ultimately made his party realize they could no longer pretend he was fit for office and forced him out of the race.
Two years later, Biden is still proving how unfit he was, this time stumbling through a combative speech in front of the very people who used to cheer him on.
Biden showed up Saturday night at the Maryland Democrat Party's Fight Back & Win Summit at Live! Casino & Hotel in Hanover, Md., to deliver a teleprompter-fed attack against Trump.
The crowd was full of party activists, the kind of room that should have been the easiest audience of his career.
Instead, hecklers interrupted him mid-speech, and by the time it was over, he struggled just to make his way off the stage.
Protesters screamed “Genocide Joe” through Joe Biden’s speech tonight.
Why are Democrats still dragging him out like this.
It’s just sad at this point. pic.twitter.com/pRk7SwAgWm
If Biden wanted to use the event to prove that he still has some fight in him, what he delivered instead was a reminder of exactly why the Democrat establishment forced him out of the race two years ago.
Of course, Biden put on a show with his usual attack lines.
He accused the president of wrecking America's alliances, enriching himself in office, and tanking the country's standing both at home and abroad, calling it "corruption on a scale never seen before."
This is from the guy who literally tried to put Trump, his political rival, in prison.
Then came the line that should embarrass every Democrat in that room.
"Have you noticed that Americans are saying the economy under the Biden administration is a hell of a lot better than under Trump?" Biden asked, and the crowd actually applauded.
It's not, of course.
Rampant inflation under Biden crushed American families and handed Trump the White House back in the first place.
Trump has since gotten inflation under control, something Biden apparently can't bring himself to acknowledge even now.
Biden kept swinging anyway. "It's simply stunning to me," he said of Trump's conduct.
"He has no shame, and frankly it's embarrassing for the country. But Trump? Trump could care less."
He also went after what he called Trump's "vanity projects," ticking off a list.
"It's not just his vanity projects — tearing down the East Wing of the White House making room for his ballroom. Putting his name on the Kennedy Center. Building an arch in his own honor. Even hiring his own pool guy to fix the reflecting pool," Biden said, before adding, "Whoa — what a loser."
And then he got lost trying to exit the stage.
Joe still can’t find his way off the stage. pic.twitter.com/zO9wSb3Ef8
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 28, 2026Two years after that debate stage exposed him to the entire country that was pretending everything was okay, Biden refuses to go away, embarrassing himself repeatedly for speaking fees because now that he’s out of power (or at least his autopen is), he has no other way to make money
Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 14:00