Oil Climbs on Hormuz Tensions, Apple’s OpenAI Lawsuit, and Earnings Season Eve 7/13/26

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**Kelly Evans** (1:02)
Thank you very much, Scott. Stocks are selling off this hour after the president said he is reinstating a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and the Fed's Waller gives a super hawkish speech. I'm Kelly Evans and welcome to The Exchange. You see the S&P down two-thirds of a percent there. Shares of SK Hynex are down nearly 8% today, putting pressure on the NASDAQ after a much worse session overseas. Other memory and chip names are under pressure too. We'll talk about those moves in a moment. Plus the latest on the Strait of Hormuz. Amrita Sen is on the ground in the Middle East as the president says the US will now become the guardian of the Strait. What does that mean? We'll get her thoughts on that. And the passing of Senator Lindsey Graham, who had been a key figure lately for relations between the Senate and the White House. We'll get more on the fallout in a bit. But let's begin with the president declaring that we will now be the guardians of the Hormuz Strait. And the US will also reimpose the blockade on Iran. That sent oil prices higher and stocks to session lows. We're still up 6% on the session to around 75 and change for WTI. Megan Casella is at the White House with all the latest for us. Megan, what can you tell us?

**Megan Casella** (2:07)
Kelly with the US blockade going back in place. Now, all the central components of last month's memorandum understanding have now been cast aside. The ceasefire is over, the sanctions are back on, and the Strait of Hormuz is clearly not back to business as usual. But here are the details today from the president. He says this morning, the US is reinstating the blockade to stop Iran's ships or customers from entering or leaving its ports. But he says that all other countries will have fair and open use of the Strait. Then he says that the US., as the guardian of the Strait, will be reimbursed for providing security to ships in the Strait at a rate of 20 percent on all cargoes shipped. Now, I've been asking the White House and US. Central Command today on how exactly this will work and no further details yet. But this is a big policy shift. We've heard the president and his top officials for months now emphasizing that they wanted to see the Strait of Hormuz free and open for all and that no country should be allowed to charge tolls. But now that appears to be changing. This, of course, coming after the US and Iran exchanging more fire this weekend. The US says it used sea drones for the first time to attack a port along the Strait. You can see some of that here on your screen. CENTCOM says the latest strikes degraded Iran's ability to keep attacking commercial ships. But we'll see, of course, now, Kelly, whether they respond with more fire.

**Kelly Evans** (3:17)
Right, and you saw the market reaction. Again, not an enormous one, but a significant uptick in the oil price. You saw the reaction in stocks. And so I guess the next question now is what's it going to take for Iran to come back to the table and maybe for there to be some kind of temporary ceasefire reimposed?

**Megan Casella** (3:34)
That's absolutely right. We're in sort of this limbo where the president has said very clearly now the ceasefire is over, but he's not directly saying that we're back to full scale war. And both sides seem to be holding back on that a little bit. We're really not seeing the sorts of kinetic activity that we were seeing back in February and March before the ceasefire first took effect in April. So it was the largest set of attacks yet. I would describe them as this weekend, dozens or hundreds of targets, Iranian military targets being hit, but still not full scale war. So will Iran now respond with more fire? The US has said that each of its last rounds of attacks were all aimed at blocking Iran from targeting commercial shipping. And now they also say that's what this charge is for. This 20% fee is to continue that US security. But it hasn't been clear yet whether the US has been able to keep ships safe. So we'll have to see what happens to commercial shipping and then of course as well whether Iran responds.