What is the single best indicator that the Hormuz disruption is physical rather than rhetorical?

The transit series has moved further since it was last marked: Strait of Hormuz departures stayed beneath their own thirty-day average on four consecutive days to 16 September, reading 311 against 327.9 on the last of them, still inside a 293-354 range. The redundancy that this position named in place of volume — the East-West bypass — is now reported as being restored, which is the change the price responded to.

Marked to market on 13 September. On 12 September this position said the physical transit layer had moved with the price for the first time, on 299 Hormuz departures against a zero-excluded thirty-one-day mean of 324.6. The next session did not confirm it: departures returned to 328 against a mean of 325.2, and US Gulf Coast departures to 57 against 56.7. One crossing was scheduling. The disruption this tell exists to detect is therefore still not visible at the source. What has changed is redundancy — the East-West bypass pipeline shut, and the Houthis holding the strait at the southern mouth of the Red Sea — and a departure count cannot show that. The product builds remain the live reading.

Marked to market on 12 September. The falsifier named a sizeable American draw in the next weekly release; what arrived was a negligible crude draw of 391,000 barrels against a 1.6 million consensus, so the falsifier did not fire — but the more useful reading has moved to the refined products. Gasoline built 1,269,000 barrels where a 1.4 million draw was expected and distillate built 2,087,000 where a 700,000 draw was expected, both on a week when crude settled above a hundred dollars and refinery utilisation slipped. For the first time in this sequence the physical transit layer moved with the price too: departures through the Strait of Hormuz fell to 299 on 11 September against a zero-excluded thirty-one-day mean of 324.6, some 1.09 standard deviations below, on a series with no missing days. So the tell now reads the disruption as physical at the source and being met by demand destruction at the destination.

The argument here is that US crude inventories discriminate between a physical disruption and a rhetorical one, because they are a question about American barrels rather than about Gulf diplomacy.

The Wednesday release that tests it landed on 26 August and showed a further build: commercial stockpiles excluding the strategic reserve rose 95,000 barrels to 428.9m. It is a small build rather than the 17.4mb this position last quoted, but it is a build, and it is the direction that matters for the question being asked.

The priced layer moved further and faster. The band on US crude reserves falling to 285m by 31 August collapsed to 0.305, from 0.395 the previous day and 0.725 on 23 August. Two independent measures — one physical, one priced — now agree that the draw is over.

That is a change in what this indicator is telling you. It no longer discriminates in favour of a physical disruption; it discriminates against one. The restriction on Hormuz transit may still be real, but American barrels are not being consumed by it.