The Global Economy Is Literally Being Choked (w/ Sal Mercogliano)

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Toyota. Let's go places. Hi guys, this is Andrew Eger with the Bullwork. Welcome to Bullwork Takes.

If you had not heard of the straight of four moves before this month, yeah, probably have now.

Iran's choke point on this passage, which is what connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman

and beyond that to the Indian Ocean. It's been responsible for not all, but most of the economic

disruption that we have already seen just three weeks into America and Israel's war on Iran.

You've almost certainly heard that much, but this is really one of those stories that kind of

gets crazier the closer at it you look. So to walk us through some of the ends and outs of the

straight of four moves crisis, I am very pleased to be joined by maybe the best guy there is on

this subject, Sal Mercogliano. He is a historian. He's a former merchant mariner. He's a professor

of maritime industry policy, and you may perhaps have stumbled upon him recently or a while ago

on his YouTube show What's Going On With Shipping, which I have been a new convert to for perhaps

good reason just this week as we have been weathering this particular crisis. So Sal, thanks for coming

on to the show. Andrew, thanks for having me. Big fan of the Bullwork. Oh, that's so nice of you to

say. Why don't you just start by setting the table for us here? What does normal peacetime function

look like in the straight of four moves? Who's going through there? And why is it important for the

economy? Yeah. So straight of four moves is a classic maritime choke point, a little narrow pinch

in in the ocean where commerce and trade. So it's not the busiest place on the planet. You know,

that's the English Channel, the straight in Malacca, the Taiwan straight, but about 135 ships a day

go through there. Big energy ships. We're talking about tankers, liquefied natural gas, liquefied petroleum

gas, or carriers of you name it. It's just it's a mesh about 25% of global trade goes through this

narrow little choke point. And what we've seen happen is that choke point has gotten choked off.

Yeah. So let's let's talk about that in the opening days of the war. I mean, it seems like this

dawn on the president very quickly. And of course, you know, this is this is something they had

had in the back of their minds in the event of possible war with Iran forever that this is

something Iran couldn't theory do very quickly. It became clear Iran was grinding all traffic to

a halt through this straight in the last week or so though that story seems like it started to

change a bit more vessels are making it through. The problem is it's mostly the ones that Iran

wants to let through. Can you talk about kind of the the new status quo that Iran is is sort of

imposing on the straight in the last few days here? Yeah. So I mean, we had a kind of shutdown with

this. And again, we went from 130 something vessels going through the just, you know, single

digits in some cases until a complete stop there for a brief period. And right now what we're seeing

is that countries are going to Iran. We're hearing about China, India, Pakistan, maybe a few others

going to Iran and getting kind of permission to run their ships through. And what we're seeing is

ships sailing out of the straight-ahore moves, but not through the normal straight. There's a

trap we call a traffic separation scheme right down the middle of the straight. It's kind of like a

highway where you go to one side, just like a center divider, but instead these ships are routing

all the way up into Iranian waters between two islands and then coming out through Iranian territorial

waters. And that tells us that Iran is basically inspecting these ships, clearing these ships,

and we actually suspect they may be paying to go through. Maybe as much as two million dollars

a ship to go through. And what basically has happened here, one of the objectives for the Trump

administration was to ensure that Iran doesn't control the straight-ahore moves. Well, Iran

controls the straight-ahore moves now. They're controlling who's going in and who's coming out.

This is one of the things that has just completely bugled my mind because by every indication that

we have, I mean, it is actually true that militarily, you know, we have a real stranglehold on the

straight right now on Iran right now. I mean, we really do, we are actually exerting military

supremacy basically over that whole region. We're flying wherever we want to. We're hitting the

things that we want to hit. And yet, Iran has much more economic control over the traffic

through that straight than they have ever had in the past. I mean, what's the disconnect here?

Why is this like weird asynchronousity the way it is right now? Well, I would say two things.

Number one, the Trump administration has a series of objectives. And unfortunately,

keeping the straight open is toward the bottom of that list of objectives. And even though we have

an impressive military force over there, we don't have enough to do all those missions concurrently,

especially in the case of escorts. I mean, there's just not enough vessels in the U.S. Navy deployed

over there to do it. And plus, we've been kind of sandwiched with past 20 years of force shipbuilding

programs. We haven't gotten the right mix of vessels. We got some very good high-end vessels like

Arleigh Burke class destroyers, but they're $2 billion a piece. And we don't have enough of them

over there. On the flip side of that, Andrew, one of the things we've seen since 2022 in the Black

Sea and 2024 in the Red Sea, you don't need a Navy to exert an anti-ship campaign. The Ukrainians

have demonstrated this against the Russians with absolutely no Navy and the Houthis have done it

against global shipping for the past two years. So even, you know, what Secretary Hegseth says is,

you know, we're going to give the Iranian Navy their half. The bottom half doesn't matter because

you don't need a Navy. It's just a threat, either unmanned aerial or uncrewed surface vessels,

drones, even the threat of mines, for example, is enough to cause havoc among shipping. And that's

exactly what we're seeing over 20 ships have been attacked so far since March 1st.

Yeah. Can you actually expand on that a little bit about what the specific logistics of what

Iran is using to keep the straight bottled up are and why it is that, you know, it's difficult

for at least the sorts of military pressures that America has brought to bear so far to prevent that.

Yeah. So what we see the Iranians using is kind of a variety of weapons. They really haven't brought

the one we think they were going to bring in the full bear, which is their missiles, either guided

missiles or ballistic missiles. We think because the US has done a good job in basically targeting

them and really knocking them out. They have basically focused on them. We think maybe one or two

ships early on were hit by something like that. The vast majority of what we see them using are

these unmanned aerial vehicles, kind of the Shaheed drones, which are these big, huge kite things

with basically a moped motor on the back of them. And then unmanned surface vessels, which are

basically remote control speedboats that they literally drive out with a human crew on board. They

get close to a vessel hop off and then remote control them almost wily coyote into the side of a

vessel. But it's effective. And we're seeing that we're unfortunately we've seen at least eight

merchant mariners killed several ships, you know, not sunk, but extremely damaged that we had a

burnt out tanker off the coast of Basra in Iraq. We had a tie a bulker lose three crew members with

an engine room fire. So I would argue that one of the things that the US Navy is prepared to do is

like kind of counter, you know, the flock of geese coming at you. They're good to shoot down the

flock of geese. What the problem is is the Iranians aren't coming with a flock of geese to coming

with a horde of gnats. And the gnats can get everywhere. They're really hard to hit. And it's

almost impossible to get all of them. And that's what we're seeing right now. Yeah, that's a great

analogy. And kind of a horrifying analogy at the same time. When it comes to, you know, the maybe

there's a silver lining here, maybe it doesn't count as a silver lining. The fact that they have

actually, you know, sort of succeeded in in destroying a lot of that missile capacity and things

like that. I mean, presumably it is worse for one of these giant vessels to be hit by a cruise

missile than to be hit by, you know, basically a speedboat driving into the side of the thing.

But perhaps it's not really like a meaningful difference when it comes to just sort of the risk

assessments for these for these boats. I mean, like, is it basically the case that as long as Iran can

do any of these things, the vast majority of these ships are just not going to not going to risk it.

Is that basically the situation we're looking at here? Yeah, so, you know, I was very critical of both

the Biden and Trump administration when they did the Red Sea operations. The Biden administration

did it early in 2023 and 2024 when the Red Sea shut down and you had Operation Prosperity Guardian

and Poseidon Archer where they attacked the Houthi. And then later on, President Trump did Operation

Rough Rider. And one of the things we found out was, first off, the US military is really good at

shooting down drones and missiles and they, you know, had almost a near perfect record of doing that.

The problem was the US military considers a 99% success rate, you know, a mission kill. It's great.

It's slam dunk. If you tell a military guy, you got a 99% chance of success, they're going to do it

in a minute. If you tell a commercial shipping guy, there's a 99% chance you're going to get through.

What they hear is there's a 1% I'm not going to get through. How do I minimize the downside of that?

That's my concern. And, you know, if I'm going to liquefied natural gas carrier, which is carrying

natural gas at minus, you know, 250 degrees Fahrenheit and you're going through and you get hit by

one of these weapons, you're basically on a floating bomb. And, you know, that's not really where I

want to be. And what I need is security. I need to be insured that that 1% isn't getting through,

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rates may apply sea terms for details. I want to talk a little bit about the ships that are

getting through here in a minute. But just on that topic, one thing I've been really struck by

listening to your show this week is obviously it's easy for everybody to think about their own

pocketbooks sitting here in America from all of this stuff that's going on. But just the human

element of the people on the ships. There are a lot of people, hundreds, thousands of crews,

is my understanding, sort of bottled up in the Persian Gulf right now who can't dock and they

can't leave. Can you just talk about what the situation is on the ground for all of these crews

right now? Yeah, I mean, it's so easy to be very abstract when we talk about war and not talk

about civilians in Iran and what they're going through. But on board ships, and it's the thing I've

been talking about a lot because I've been talking to some of the crews out there. You know, we

estimate the International Maritime Organization has estimated 3,200 ships in the Persian Gulf with

about 20,000 seafarers on board. And I received a note from one seafarer who talked about an

encounter with a ship that they had a problem on board. Their water maker, their purifier was out

and the ship was out of water. I mean, they just literally out of water and they were begging to go

into port to get water and the port refused them. They didn't want them in port because they didn't

want a target coming in. And this, this Mariner alone with others out there telling me, listen, we

we came in here three weeks ago. We're 22, 23 people on board. We don't have enough food. I mean,

we just don't have enough food because we're running low on stores. We replenish when we go into

port. We get, you know, how often do you go to the grocery and get food, you know, and you know,

you prepare for long voyages, but you plan on resupply at periodic points. Ships are running

out of fuel. I mean, they're just running out of fuel. And the concern here is a humanitarian

crisis that goes on. They're starting to call themselves the yellow fleet. And the reason they

use that term is back during the six day war when back in 1968, when the Suez Canal closed,

there was a fleet of ships that got stuck in the Suez Canal and they were there for years.

And the ships turned yellow from the dust. And they're worried about becoming a new version of

that stuck inside the straight of war moves kind of corked in the bottle. I mean, it's just such a

such a crazy situation. Let's talk, let's talk a little bit now about the exception to the rule,

which are some of these ships that we have started to see get through apparently on, you know,

with the blessing of Iran. And these are ships that are, you know, either Iranian ships themselves

or they, they are, they're flagged by Iranian allies. And, and it does actually appear that Iran

is just sort of has carte blanche and who gets in and who gets out and they've actually begun to,

to, you know, operationalize that in the last few days. Obviously, you know, you don't need that

much material to stop all these other ships from getting out. But that cuts both ways, right? I

mean, in theory, the United States could be also blocking Iranian ships from getting out under

ordinary American economic policy. Iranian oil is not supposed to be being sold around the world

to begin with, right? So can you just talk a little bit about the posture that the US has taken here

in terms of economic policy toward, toward Iran and this oil that we have seen start to get out of

the, of the Persian Gulf here? Yeah, well, the, the word I use, Andrew is confusing. I'm trying to

figure it out myself. If you look at US policy, for example, towards Venezuela, we initiated a

take down of 10 tankers that were carrying Venezuela in oil. I mean, the US military executed this,

seized the vassals, brought them into US ports are in the process of selling off the ship and the

oil. Iranian ships are not just selling out in the ocean. I mean, they're loading at Carg Island

and Jask a port outside of the, the straight or moose. They're loading and selling out of the

straits. And, and not only are they selling and out, we just had Secretary Besson come out,

the energy secretary come out and say, we want that Iranian oil on the global market to make up for

the shortfall that oil that is stuck in the Persian Gulf, which is caused by Iran, which is just the

most confusing policy out there. I just can't quite get a handle on it. But it, it's, it's interesting

because I had talked about early on, you know, an interesting policy for the US would have been

the seized those Iranian tankers, you know, minimal crews on board civilian crews, perfect

negotiating tool if you want to end the conflict because my concern is how do you end this conflict?

How, what, what does it look like at the end? Because the fear here is that the, the straight or

horror moose becomes kind of like the Red Sea in that it's not clear that it's over yet with

the Houthi, is it clear that it's over with the Iranians? This is the issue with Carg Island,

there's, there's not enough troops, you know, going to the Persian Gulf to seize Iran by any means,

but they can grab Carg Island, but Carg Island is, I would argue, could become a hostage in this deal,

but bombing Carg Island would put Iran in a tough situation because I got nothing to lose at that

point. So it's, it's a lot of very high-stake oil politics here, you know, that they're playing

between the Trump administration and Iran right now. You mentioned the fear of there never really

being a get back to a real normal scenario here, and I'm just a, my, my, my, my producer Matt

here is just sending me apparently the president just a few minutes before we started talking,

he was asked about some of this stuff and he said, you know, we don't use the straight, we don't

need it. You know, we don't use the straight, we don't, the United States, we don't need it.

So that's, that's kind of an interesting, a little bit of insight into his mind on all of this,

but you talk about some of the weird sorts of policies that seem to be at loggerheads with one

another, and I, I do think there's a pretty strong case to be made that this is just them,

you know, sort of reacting against one domestic political pressure or another, right? I mean,

if it's, if the question is, how do you prevent, you know, some of these sort of smaller scale attacks,

one answer would be, well, you send in troops and you stop them from, from sort of launching these,

these sorts of guerrilla assaults on shipping and things like that, and you sort of occupy the

coasts there. And that is, you know, an argument that that probably would work at least in the,

in the short term for doing some of these things, but it would cross, you know, a, a pretty

stark political red line in America where, you know, it seems to be the case that Americans for

whatever reason are a lot more comfortable with, you know, bombing the, the shit out of a country

from afar than they are with, with troops on the ground, you know, for perhaps good and bad reasons.

Or, or you talk about, you know, why are they letting this rain in oil through well? Obviously,

the, the president, one of the things that he is really concerned about is these upward pressures

on global gas prices all over the place. And, and if it's, if it's a choice between, you know,

letting Iran break in a bunch of money and, and keeping prices somewhat lower and stopping them

from doing that and letting prices go even higher, I guess the triangulation that they've made is that,

that they're going to just try to keep the gas prices pushed down. I mean, is that seem,

seem like a fair-ish reading of, of at least sort of connecting some of these, some of these dots

together? Well, I mean, what you, the way to understand the policy right now, unsanctioning Russian

and Iranian fuel, a 60-day waiver, the Jones Act, which allows foreign ships to move cargo

between U.S. ports, they're trying to push down the gas prices. That's exactly what they're trying

to do. This is all an, an effort because while President Trump is exactly right, we don't get a lot

of exports out of the Persian Gulf. We live in a global world that's interconnected and if you cut

off 20% of global oil and you cut off 17% of, of the LNG, liquefied natural gas coming out and you

cut off a third of the fertilizer coming out, well, that's going to come from somewhere else.

And what we're seeing is that's being pulled out of the United States. We're seeing gasoline

being pulled out of the United States, diesel fuel, oil, natural gas being pulled out of the United

States, which is great for us. It's a great marketplace because we're being able to sell that on the

on the global marketplace, but what it means for the consumer is we're seeing gas prices go up

higher than, you know, almost ever before. The gas has been the highest in February 2022

when Russia invaded Ukraine because it caused a shock to the system. That's what this is doing

right now. We don't live in an isolated world where you can choke off 25% of global trade and

don't think it affects the rest of the world. I use the analogy all the time. You look at that

big, huge map of the world with all ships going through everywhere and that's like the circulatory

system of global trade. What we've done is put a clamp on a femoral artery and we've choked off

25% of the blood flow. If you leave a clamp for a long period of time, you're going to cause

permanent damage and that's the problem we're seeing right now. You've got to get the straight back

open, but even if today, Andrew, both President Trump and the new Ayatola hugged and made up and

it was unicorns and rainbows again. Shipping companies are going to look at that. It's like,

is this safe to go through again? Because it's still the Ayatola. Trump is still president until

2029. You know, could this happen again and have we fundamentally restructured the global economy

because of this? And I don't know that the Trump administration had that on their list of

accomplishments, what they were going to achieve when they went into Iran. I think this is low

down on their order. And if anybody said this in that meeting, they were probably in the back row

and probably were afraid to raise their hand. Yeah. I mean, you're talking about again,

sort of a best case scenario here where not only does this happen, does this reopen tomorrow, but

you know, Iran and Israel and we all agree, no more hitting energy infrastructure, no more actual

permanent damage to just pulling all this stuff up out of the ground to begin with. And then,

you know, immediately trying to get underway on snarling these supply chains. Let me talk,

let me ask you about the flip side of that, which is that, you know, CNN reported today,

the defense intelligence agency had made sort of a preliminary estimate that maybe Iran could keep

the straight closed for as long as one to six months. I mean, what kind of a world are we talking

about there where this is just closed off? I mean, if six months from now, we're finally getting

around to reopening the state of Hormuz. Can we even game that out? Or what can we say about what

the economy would look like under those conditions? Well, I mean, you're talking about bankrupting

Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, you know, Saudi is going to be crippled from this because they

can't get the majority of their oil out, UAE. I mean, these are economies that are huge energy

demands. There's not enough energy to meet this. So, for example, on the oil issue right now,

I argue to the very first week, okay, shutting down oil from out of the straits is not a big deal

because number one, we've got a hundred million barrels of oil afloat sitting off Singapore

in Malaysia all the time because guess what? We don't flow oil right from an oil well into a

refinery. It goes through basically holding tanks. There's always storage out there. But the story

that got me today was, hey, that fleet of vessels off of Singapore and Malaysia is going down.

If you look at the number of tankers that are loaded, they're decreasing, which means once they go away,

you're pulling directly from refineries. You're in a just in time type of logistics for oil.

And then you start pulling down from reserves in the United States, in Japan and China.

That creates problems. Now you have energy shortages. You're seeing in Pakistan right now,

where we're seeing Pakistan rationing energy right now in power because they were getting fuel

out of Saudi Arabia, but they're not getting that fuel out of the Persian Gulf now, which means

longer miles. We may have to ship cargo over longer miles, which means we need more tankers,

which we don't have. This is going to cause disruptions. And again, for every, you know, the best

analogy I have for this, Andrew, is whenever given when sideways in the Suez in March of 2021,

pinched off and closed the Suez canal for six days. 450 ships piled up on each side of the canal,

kind of is just like a cork in a bottle. And then we popped it out and all of a sudden traffic

started flowing. It took six weeks to three months to sort that out before the log jam and ports,

before everything kind of settled back down from what you did. You know, on a best case estimate,

it takes you a week to fix a one day massive disruption. We're 21 days into this. You're talking

about 21 weeks. You're talking about a third of a year. It's almost half a year we're getting to

before we see this resonate out. If you go further than a month out, I don't know. You're talking

about restructuring the global trade patterns of the planet, which literally only happens during

world wars. I mean, that's the only time you see it. And when this happens, we change the way

we do transportation when the Suez closed in 1968. For eight years, we created super tankers because

it was more efficient to create these huge behemoth tankers to go around Africa and go to Asia.

What do we do now? I don't know. We're going to have to rewrite how we do trade on a global scale

because we don't we so we substantially move more cargo today than we did back then. We were

moving maybe about two to three billion tons of cargo a year back in the 1960s and 70s. We

moved 12 billion today. So I mean, we're just so interconnected. And the volume and velocity in

which we move traffic is such that when you create these disruptions, it resonates throughout the

entire supply web. Yeah, I mean, it really is amazing. And this is one of those thoughts that you

almost only ever have caused to have have caused to think unless it's your your whole job, like it's

kind of your whole job to think about these things, the frictionless functioning of global trade and

just all of the stuff that is constantly hurtling around at all times and just sort of the the

efficiency and the economic benefits that that generates that you just don't even notice until all

of a sudden, I mean, it's like the circulation of your blood. It's not until you have the, you know,

coronary episode that you really come to appreciate how important that was. Yeah, I mean,

it's it's really remarkable. One other thing. I mean, I just not to dwell on the president. I mean,

it is kind of his thing. This is kind of why this is all happening. But he said something in the

Oval Office yesterday that really struck me, which is that he said, yeah, you know, I know there's

been some economic pain from this. We had to do it. We had to do it. And, and, you know, they're

they had foreign policy aims. They wanted to pursue whatever. But, but he said, you know, and actually,

I kind of thought the the economic situation was going to be worse. I've been kind of pleasantly

surprised by, by, you know, the amount of damage that we've seen. And I'm just listening to you talk

about what's coming next. And I am, I'm like, my eyes are getting wider and wider. And I'm starting

to freak out a little more and a little more. But, but I guess that that might be a fine place to

leave it for now. A dark place to leave it for now, but a fine place to leave it for now.

Obviously, we're going to continue to follow this story a lot. Everybody else will as well,

whether they want to or not, because it is it's coming for everybody. You actually do get a lot

out of global trade when it works right. And right now, it's not working very well for for all

of these reasons. Sal, thanks for coming on. Tell the people where they can find you.

Yeah, you can find me at YouTube. I run my channel. What's going on with shipping? Where we talk

about this all the time. I'm on Twitter at Mercogliano S and at Blue Sky. So if you want to follow

me, you can follow me over there. And I'll leave you with this, Andrew. I just want to say that,

listen, global shipping has been challenged in the past. We've seen huge events happen,

but it's pretty resolute. And I think the, I think the human beings are very resolute. I think

we will overcome this. I think the Trump administration underestimated the situation. And I think

that's what is caught them right now. And I think right now we're scrambling to kind of fix it.

And it's going to take a concentrated effort to do it. But you know, I tend to be optimistic,

not pessimistic, but I apologize if I came across like that. But it's serious. And I think it's

important that everybody knows that. That's a better note to end on. I'm so glad you came in with

that because I hate, I hate just driving off into the dark that way. So I appreciate it. Sal,

Mercogliano, thank you very much for coming on and talking through some of this stuff with us.

And thanks to everybody out there who has been following along. Thanks for listening. Whether

you're on YouTube, whether you're on our sub stack, we hope you'll head over to the bullwork.com.

Check out more of our stuff. Check out Sal's podcast as well. Just such fascinating stuff. We'll

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