MacroVoices #529 Ole S Hansen: Commodities in The Wake of The Iran Crisis

**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
This is Macro Voices, the free weekly financial podcast targeting professional finance, high net worth individuals, family offices and other sophisticated investors.
Macro Voices is all about the brightest minds in the world of finance and macroeconomics, telling it like it is. Bullish or bearish, no holds barred. Now, here are your hosts, Erik Townsend and Patrick Ceresna.

**Erik Townsend** (0:33)
Macro Voices, episode 529 was produced on April 23rd, 2026 I'm Erik Townsend.
SaxoBank's chief commodity strategist, Ole Hansen returns as this week's feature interview guest. We'll discuss what comes next in the Iran conflict, what the longer term implications are for energy markets, what's coming in food inflation and how to trade it, and a longer term outlook for secular inflation. Then be sure to stay tuned for our postgame segment, and Patrick's Trade of the Week will explore how to position in crude oil using options on longer dated crude oil futures in order to reap the benefits of backwardation by capturing an entry price well below the current front month price, something Ole Hansen will explain during the feature interview. And then we'll have our usual coverage of all the markets with Patrick's postgame chart deck.

**Patrick Ceresna** (1:25)
And I'm Patrick Ceresna with the Macro Scoreboard week over week as of the close of Wednesday, April 23rd, 2026
S&P 500 up 164 basis points trading at 71.38, continuing to press 52-week highs. We'll take a closer look at that chart and the key technical levels to watch in the postgame segment. US dollar index up 56 basis points trading at 98.60. The June WTI crude oil contract up 591 basis points trading at 92.96. Back into the 90s after last week's dip. The June Arbob gasoline up 797 basis points to 3.25, pressing back to 52-week highs. The June gold contract down 147 basis points trading at 47.53. The May copper up 82 basis points trading at 6.13. The April uranium up 64 basis points to 86.75.
And the US 10-year treasury yield up 3 basis points trading at 4.31. The key news to watch next week is we have the Bank of Japan, ECB, and the FOMC policy rates and statements, the core PCE inflation numbers, and a large number of key earnings releases. This week's feature interview guest is Saxo Bank head of commodity strategy, Ole Hansen. Erik and Ole discussed the broad ripple effects of the Iran-driven energy shock, why tightness in refined products and commodity inputs may be underappreciated, how extreme backwardation is creating powerful return tailwinds, and why fertilizer shortages and supply constraints across metals and agriculture could drive the next leg of the commodity cycle. Erik's interview with Ole Hansen is coming up as Macro Voices continues right here at macrovoices.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:31)
And now with this week's special guest, here's your host, Erik Townsend.

**Erik Townsend** (3:36)
Joining me now is Ole Hansen, who heads up commodity research at Saxo Bank. Ole prepared a slide deck to accompany today's interview, so I strongly encourage you to download that as we'll be referring to those slides over the course of this interview. The download link is in your research roundup email. If you don't have a research roundup email, it means you're not yet registered at macrovoices.com. Just go to our homepage, macrovoices.com, click the red button above Ole's picture that says, Looking for the Downloads. Ole, obviously the big story is oil and Iran. I shouldn't say oil, it's energy generally, and Iran and other commodities that are affected by this whole conflict. We just had a dip, which hopefully many of our listeners were listening last week when I suggested there's going to be a big dip that came on Friday morning. Hopefully, people bought $79 crude oil when they had the chance to do so. You've missed that opportunity if you didn't do it then.
Tell us your perspective on the big picture of what's going on with energy, how long this is likely to last, and what we can expect for energy markets out of this conflict.

**Ole Hansen** (4:45)
Well, hello, Erik. Thank you very much for having me back.
I think there's no doubt that even though the market is behaving relatively benignly, especially if you're just watching front bonds, the futures price in the crude oil market, you will kind of be saying, what's the whole fuss about? But this disruption we're seeing right now is just so profound because it's not only the energy space that we are seeing being impact. One thing is crude oil, but another thing is the all the refined products where we're really seeing the tightness right now, diesel, jet fuel, petrochemicals and so on. But it's also the associated impacts that we're seeing. I think many were probably not aware how the importance of the Middle East besides energy production, that in recent years, the Middle East has obviously expanded its production base. Why just sell oil out of the ground and send it on the ship when you can actually make some money on the process of refining these into other areas. That's why we suddenly left with a market where besides gas, obviously, which is Qatar and a major supplier to the global market, we have all the associated productions of commodities that takes place in the Persian Gulf simply because they have an abundance of cheap energy available. So the energy intensive commodities, that's anything from aluminium to especially fertilize which requires a lot of gas with the main feed stock. They have become key issues. Reason we just come to know as well that miners in South America then need sulfuric acids in order to break down the copper from their mines and that basically means with 50 percent of that coming out of the Middle East, then we also suddenly face a potential shortage in that area. We talked about helium has been mentioned prior to the chips industry. So it's just the whole, how the breadth of this crisis and how it impacts not only energy, but anything through to metals and the agriculture as well. The duration is really the one that everyone is trying to work out because looking at the forward curves, especially in the energy space in Crude Oil, you would imagine that you think that this would be over within a few months.