MacroVoices #541 Dr. Anas Alhajji: Bab el-Mandeb: The Next Oil Chokepoint Nobody's Watching

**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 541 was produced on July 16th, 2026 I'm Erik Townsend. Dr. Anas Alhajji is back for what will be his most complete interview to date on the Hormuz crisis and how it evolved. We'll start with an update on the week's news and then step back and review how we got into this conflict and why Anas still believes that it was the goal of the United States to close Hormuz initially.
I intentionally let this interview run long, so make the popcorn and sit back for an extended length interview with Dr. Anas Alhajji on how this trade of Hormuz crisis came to be. Then stay tuned for our new and improved Macro Voices trading desk, where Patrick and Masil will deliver a fast-paced market wrap featuring Patrick's trade of the week, fresh positioning insights from the commitment of traders reports, and a concise breakdown of the key markets you need to watch.

**Patrick Ceresna** (1:27)
And I'm Patrick Ceresna. The S&P 500 spent the week consolidating near its 52-week highs but has yet to break above the June peak, which continues to act as near-term overhead resistance. Crude oil delivered another major advance, gaining nearly $9 or roughly 1,280 basis points week over week as it moved up to test its 50-day moving average.
Meanwhile, gold remains notably weak near its June and July lows, raising the question of whether another leg lower is about to begin.
We'll discuss this and more after the interview. This week's feature interview guest is oil market expert Anas Alhajji. Erik and Anas discuss the outlook for crude oil and refined products, why the real bottleneck may be in refining rather than the raw oil supply, and how geopolitics, energy security, LNG, and AI-driven power demand are reshaping the global energy markets. Erik's interview with Anas Alhajji is coming up as Macro Voices continues right here at macrovoices.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:41)
And now with this week's special guest, here's your host, Erik Townsend.

**Erik Townsend** (2:46)
Joining me now is Energy Outlook Advisors founder Dr. Anas Alhajji. Anas, it's great to have you back. Needless to say, this has been a huge week of escalation in the Iran conflict.
You have a note out this week though to your subscribers saying, hey, pay attention here because you need to focus your eye on where the ball is. And it's not so much Hormuz, it's actually straight of Bob Elmandem that we need to watch next. So give us the update on what's going on and tell us particularly about your writings this week as to why Bob Elmandem requires as much attention as Hormuz does.

**Anas Alhajji** (3:25)
Thank you for having me on the show again. The main point here is the market has already priced kind of a closure of Hormuz for a longer period. And the surprise to the market was not the kind of the breaking of the MOU or the end of the MOU. The surprise to the market was how fast basically Trump basically agreed to the MOU and how fast he signed it, and how fast the amount of oil that was stranded basically left the Hormuz trade. So we got over 120 million barrels out of the Hormuz trade. So that was really the surprise to the market, not the end of the MOU.
So what happened is the Iranian regime is not unified, it's not one unit. So we have the Iranian regime, we have the negotiators, but we do have the hardliners of the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guard. And those are not part of the government, but they are very well trained and they are well-equipped in terms of various weapons, etc.
And those guys benefited greatly from the sanctions and benefited greatly from what's been going on for a long time. And we should point out that Iran's oil production increased substantially to the extent that the production in 2025 is the highest in like 20-something years. And in February, Iran's oil exports were the highest since 2017
So those guys have been making a lot of money despite the sanctions and despite everything else. They control the economy and they benefit from the prestige, the control and the money. And we are talking about billions and billions of dollars.
And it seems that the Trump administration underestimated their power and their will. And the reason why those guys do not want to negotiate, because if everything goes back to normal, and all the money goes to the Iranian people and to the government, they lose everything. They lose the control, they lose the money, they lose the prestige. So they are behaving like a drug cartel. They are literally willing to fight. You know, drug cartels are willing to fight. They fight. And they are willing to fight for the money and for the whatever they have. And that's what we've seen. So they kept attacking ships and other countries in an effort to derail the negotiations.