Economy
Iran to tankers: Use approved Hormuz routes or face ‘forceful response’
Oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz must use Tehran’s approved routes or face a “forceful response,” Iran’s joint military command warned Thursday, ratcheting up tensions again over a waterway crucial for international energy supplies.
The strait, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf, has emerged as one of the top issues in negotiations seeking a permanent end to the Iran war. The statement from the Khatam al-Anbiya military command, reported by Iranian state television, comes after both U.S. and Iranian diplomats met with mediators Wednesday in Qatar.
It wasn’t clear what sparked the threat from Iran. However, the U.S. military’s Central Command had put out a statement about a meeting with officials from Middle East nations in Bahrain that said “leaders underscored their shared commitment to the free flow of commerce through” the strait.
That could have been the phrase that angered Iran, which is preparing for the funeral that begins this weekend for the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the war’s first moments in February.
“Any failure to comply, deviation from the designated route, or disregard for the navigation protocols of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the Strait of Hormuz will be met with an immediate and forceful response from the armed forces, endangering the security of the violating vessels,” the Iranian statement said.
It also said that interference by U.S. forces in the strait “will be met with a rapid and decisive reaction.”
Iran and the United States agreed as part of an interim deal to allow ships to pass without paying charges for 60 days. But Tehran insisted it must control the routes of the vessels and later charge fees for passage, upending decades of practice in the waterway.
The U.S. and many Gulf Arab states say they won’t agree to Iran charging for passage through the strait. An effort by Oman and a United Nations agency to launch a new route near Oman’s shore sparked attacks across the Middle East last weekend, highlighting the tensions.
Despite the attacks, ship traffic in the strait continued to rebound. At least 258 ships transited the waterway last week, a period that included Iranian strikes on two commercial vessels, according to marine data and analysis company Lloyd’s List Intelligence. That’s up from 138 ships the previous week.
Iran’s attacks on June 25 and 27 “seem to have been forgotten,” Richard Meade, editor-in-chief at Lloyd’s, said Thursday during a webinar.
Traffic in the strait has slowed somewhat since the strikes and remains far below levels seen before the war, when about 130 vessels passed through daily. And with ship operators having to choose between complying with Iran’s demands or braving the route off Oman watched by U.S. forces, “nothing about this situation is stable,” Meade said.
“Routes are being chosen on an hour-by-hour basis… and they are contingent on shifting political approvals and real-time security assessments,” he said. “This is not the new normal.”
Earlier this week, Iranian state television reported that a foreign ship got stuck in the strait after ignoring instructions from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
Despite the tensions, Wednesday’s talks saw “positive progress,” Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tahir Andrabi said. He told journalists that Pakistan hoped the next round of talks would be scheduled as soon as possible after Khamenei’s funeral.
Tesla on Thursday reported record-setting second-quarter delivery numbers that smashed past Wall Street estimates, in a possible sign that damage from a customer revolt over Elon Musk and boycotts is mostly behind it.
The electric vehicle maker run by Musk reported Thursday that it delivered 480,126 cars to customers, a jump of 25% over the 384,122 figure a year ago when many Europeans refused to buy his cars because of his embrace of far-right political candidates there.
The April-June sales, the second straight quarterly gain in a row, also came in much higher than the 401,000 that Wall Street analysts had been expecting, according to a FactSet survey.
Tesla produced 451,758 vehicles during the quarter. The deliveries exceeded production by more than 28,000 vehicles, leading the company to draw down inventory that it built up during the first quarter.
It’s a big turnaround from just a few months ago when Tesla reported sales had fallen in 2025 for a second year in a row and it had to yield its crown as the world’s largest EV maker to China’s BYD.
Strong results offer a crucial cushion as Musk focuses on expensive ambitions in autonomous driving and artificial intelligence, the main drivers of the company’s roughly $1.6 trillion valuation.
Shares of the Austin, Texas-based company fell sharply in midday trading Thursday, down about 7%, an odd development that Seth Goldstein of Morningstar attributed possibly to profit-taking by investors after a recent run-up in its shares.
For the second-quarter figures, the company didn’t break out results by country, but an earlier report from trade groups reported big sales increases in Europe in May, including a 300% rise in Germany.
Tesla introduced cheaper Model Y and Model 3 models last year in hopes of boosting sales. In Europe, it also cut the cost of leasing and loans. Sales were also helped by a surge of EV buying in general on the continent as gas and diesel prices have risen due to the Iran war.
“Their pricing and their products are helping the buyers overcome any issues they might have with Elon Musk personally,” said Sam Fiorani, vice president at research firm AutoForecast Solutions.
For future quarters, Tesla hopes to lure even more Europeans as countries approve use of its driver assistance feature, available in the U.S., called Full Self-Driving (Supervised). The Netherlands approved the system in April, followed by Estonia, Greece and Lithuania.
Sales fell last year amid protests at showrooms in Europe and the U.S., a Musk figure burned effigy in Milan and vandalism against Tesla drivers. Customers were angry about him publicly supporting far-right political candidates in elections. In the U.S., too, many of Tesla’s traditional buyers stopped buying because of Musk’s work heading a Trump administration group cutting government spending.
Tesla was also hurt in the U.S. by the elimination of a tax break for buying electric vehicles in the fall last year, which added as much as $7,500 to EV costs. That is still keeping EV buyers away even as gas prices have risen.
Tesla sales in the U.S. weren’t broken out in the latest report, but research firm Cox Automotive estimates they are still falling fast, down 20% in the second quarter from the year earlier period.
“I think the huge growth in Europe is the key driver for Tesla right now. U.S. sales still appear to be down, albeit less than the broader U.S. EV decline, while China is seeing small growth,” said Seth Goldstein, senior equity analyst at Morningstar.
Goldstein, who had expected a third straight annual decline, said after the report: “I think it would be very hard to see a decline for the full year at this point.”
Amid Tesla struggles last year, Musk managed to shift the narrative about the company’s future away from its car business to its robots, automated driving system and self-driving robotaxis.
Judging from the stock price, investors approve. Shares have fully recovered from a deep dive early last year, rocketing more than 40% in the past 12 months.
The U.S. added fewer new jobs in June than expected, while the unemployment rate ticked down, government data showed on Thursday, signaling the labor market was still facing headwinds.
Total nonfarm payroll employment grew by 57,000, and the unemployment rate fell slightly to 4.2%, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said in a statement on Thursday.
The main job growth sectors included health care and social assistance, while the leisure and hospitality sector lost jobs after a strong showing the previous month.
After months of seesawing growth and contraction, the U.S. job market posted strong gains in the last three months – but Thursday’s data revised some of those numbers down.
Employment in April and May was revised down by 74,000 jobs, the BLS said.
June’s data badly missed market expectations, with economists polled by Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) expecting growth of 115,000 jobs.
Nevertheless, job growth remained in positive territory, with the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) not expected to intervene on the labor side of its mandate.
All eyes have been on the Fed since new chair Kevin Warsh headed his first rate-setting meeting last month, with the central bank indicating its focus was firmly on surging inflation.
Being part of almost every conversation at this week’s meeting of the global central bankers was one big unknown: How artificial intelligence will impact the world economy and therefore their mandate to ensure financial stability.
The consensus of those discussions at the European Central Bank’s (ECB) annual conference in the windy hills of Portugal was that AI has the power to disrupt everything and create problems they can’t even imagine right now: in financial and labor markets, in bank lending, for security, and even for power demand.
“If AI overdelivers, it will impact financial stability. If AI underdelivers, it will impact financial stability,” Torsten Slok at Apollo Global Management told the arbiters of interest rates around the world at one of the main panel sessions in the resort of Sintra.
AI was such an overarching theme in Sintra that the topic found its way into every discussion, from immigration and supervision to climate.
It even outdid new Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh, making his debut meeting with fellow central bankers, as the clear star of the three-day show.
While AI can improve every corner of life, many speakers feared that it can also disrupt it, at times illegally, and that finance officials have few, if any, tools to stop it.
“This is the biggest time of consequence to each of our economies, I think, in our lifetime,” Warsh said about the AI revolution.
“Who knew when the internet was born that the internet was going to create a million and a half jobs as Uber drivers? We are in the first to second inning of this revolution,” he told the ECB Forum.
Inflating bubbles
In the case of trading, automation is already running most functions. But an AI-driven boost could inflate bubbles at warp speed, then crash them, profiting both on the way up and on the way down in a type of collusion that is now illegal.
“Something that is even more advanced and potentially more disturbing is the ability of these algorithms to coordinate on a manipulative path of prices,” University of Pennsylvania professor Itay Goldstein said.
“These algorithms indeed manage to achieve this kind of manipulation, creating bubbles leading to crashes, and this, I think, has more significant implications for financial stability,” he added.
One potential bubble AI is already creating is that of AI stocks, in part generated by massive capital spending on the building blocks of AI, which Slok estimated had added one percentage point to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) alone.
While valuations have retreated in recent weeks, experts liken the rapid rise in pricing to some of the biggest asset price busts in history, like the British railway mania of the 1840s, the roaring 1920s, or the dotcom boom.
“The scale and pace of the current AI investment boom, accompanied by expectations of large productivity payoffs, bear a resemblance to these precedents, highlighting potential downside risks in the near term,” the Bank for International Settlements said in a report.
Supervising the unexplainable
AI will also help but complicate lending. Banks will be able to do more sophisticated credit analysis and extend funding to borrowers now outside their traditional sphere.
But supervising this will be a nightmare.
“How do supervisors assess those kinds of agentic loan decisions? They are a little bit black box. There’s potentially a lack of explainability, and I think that is a key supervisory challenge,” Tobias Adrian, a senior IMF official, said.
AI will also drive a wedge between richer and poorer firms and countries.
Defending against malicious threats will become even more expensive, and otherwise viable firms will struggle to protect themselves.
“When you think of the most outrageous attacks, they’re often attacking the weakest link,” Adrian said.
Sarah Breeden, a Bank of England deputy governor, said a potential solution may be to create some sort of insurance scheme, likening it to deposit insurance in case of bank failures.
“In a cyber context, do we need systems that allow one institution to pick up another’s basic functions during disruption?” she said.
But the ultimate risk is that the excessive success of AI could fundamentally undermine the global economy.
If AI delivers on some of the most optimistic efficiency expectations, machines could replace humans en masse, leading to large unemployment. This then reduces disposable incomes and pushes the economy into recession, undermining the case for the investment.
But if AI is less successful, then the massive investment in the sector fails to deliver the expected returns.
“The internet proved to be better than anybody imagined, created whole new businesses, but we still got the dotcom bubble,” Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem said. “It doesn’t mean there can’t be a period where the market gets ahead of itself, and you see an entrenchment.”
Türkiye and the Netherlands agreed on a new road map to advance commercial and economic cooperation during the sixth meeting of the Türkiye-Netherlands Joint Economic and Trade Committee (JETCO), Trade Minister Ömer Bolat said Thursday.
“We successfully held the 6th Meeting of the Türkiye-Netherlands JETCO today in The Hague,” Bolat wrote on Turkish social media platform NSosyal.
The meeting was co-chaired by Bolat and Dutch Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma.
Bolat said the two sides “outlined the road map for commercial and economic cooperation” between Türkiye and the Netherlands for the upcoming period.
Under the JETCO framework, the two countries discussed ways to advance cooperation in strategic areas, including bilateral trade and investments, contracting and technical consultancy services, cooperation in third countries, support for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), energy, agriculture, water management, transportation, financial cooperation, and the circular economy.
The ministers also exchanged views on key items on the EU agenda, particularly the modernization of the customs union and green transformation.
Bolat said Türkiye and the Netherlands reaffirmed their shared commitment to further deepening their strong economic partnership based on mutual benefit, while expanding cooperation into new areas.
He noted that bilateral trade volume rose from $6.3 billion in 2015 to $13.3 billion in 2025, more than doubling over the decade.
The Netherlands remains Türkiye’s largest foreign investor, with an investment stock of $39.2 billion, while Turkish investments in the Netherlands reached $24.3 billion, according to Bolat.
The Netherlands is one of Türkiye’s key economic partners in Europe, with close ties in trade, logistics, agriculture, energy, water technologies, finance and investment. The country also serves as an important base for Turkish companies expanding into European markets.
JETCO meetings are designed to strengthen bilateral trade and investment ties by bringing together public authorities and business representatives from both countries. The mechanism also provides a platform to address trade barriers, identify new areas of cooperation and support private-sector partnerships.
Bolat said the common vision set out in the 6th JETCO Protocol signed at the meeting would “pave the way for new opportunities in trade, investment, and technology,” contribute to stronger partnerships between Turkish and Dutch companies, and further deepen economic ties.
Türkiye’s state export agency, Türk Eximbank, announced on Thursday that is secured a total of $830 million in syndicated loans from 32 international banks in euro and U.S. dollar currencies with one-, two- and three-year maturity tranches.
According to a statement from Türk Eximbank, the bank has successfully completed a new syndicated loan transaction, once again demonstrating its strong credit reputation and investor confidence in international markets.
While $830 million in funding was provided within the scope of the transaction, the syndication loan was concluded with a renewal rate of 129%. A total of 32 international banks participated in the transaction, including nıne first-time participants.
Completed during a period when geopolitical risks and fluctuations in financing costs continue in international financial markets, the transaction is considered an important indicator of the confidence international financial institutions have in Türk Eximbank and Türkiye’s export-oriented growth perspective.
The mentioned funding will be used to meet the financing needs of exporter companies operating in the real sector that contribute to production, investment and employment.
Total external funding at $5.1 billion in 2026
Since the beginning of the year, Türk Eximbank has raised its total external funding to $5.1 billion by maintaining its effective funding strategy in international credit and capital markets.
As the bank continues to provide exporters with more competitive resources through its long-term and diversified financing structure, it also remains one of the most important financial institutions contributing to the country’s export goals.
Additionally, the one-year tranche of the syndication loan was structured in a sustainability-linked manner.
Supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) exporting environmentally friendly products and women entrepreneurs as exporters, Türk Eximbank aims to make export financing not only an instrument for economic growth but also a key tool for green transformation, inclusive development and sustainable production.
In a statement, Türk Eximbank CEO Ali Güney stated that the result achieved during a period of ongoing global market uncertainties clearly demonstrates the confidence international financial institutions have in Türk Eximbank.
Güney pointed out that the most valuable factor in international financial markets is to be among the institutions in which investors have trust.
“This transaction, which we completed with a 129% renewal rate and the participation of nine new international banks, is a concrete indication of the strong balance sheet of Türk Eximbank, its effective risk management, and confidence in Türkiye’s production power,” he said.
“This trust turns into a strategic financing capacity that supports the international competitiveness of our exporters,” he added.
Güney recalled that since the beginning of 2026, the total funding they have secured from international credit and capital markets has reached $5.1 billion.
“This resource represents a long-term development investment that supports our exporting companies’ entry into new markets, the financing of high-value-added production, and the sustainable growth of the Turkish economy,” he noted.
“This transaction, which stands out with its sustainability-linked structure, is also an important part of our financing approach that prioritizes green transformation, SMEs and inclusive exports,” he maintained.
“As Türk Eximbank, we will continue to inject the resources we secure from international markets into our economy in ways that will increase our exporters’ competitiveness,” he concluded.
Turkish conglomerate IC Holding plans to develop up to 20 small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) in Türkiye and neighboring countries under a strategic partnership with U.S.-based ARC Clean Technology, a senior executive said on Wednesday.
The company, one of the main contractors on Türkiye’s first nuclear power plant project, Akkuyu, signed an agreement with ARC in April to deploy the company’s sodium-cooled advanced SMR technology.
Under the plan, IC Holding aims to build 10 reactors with a combined installed capacity of 1,000 megawatts (MW) in Türkiye, while developing another 10 reactors in neighboring countries, Murad Bayar, chair of IC Nuclear Technology, said.
Türkiye seeks to expand nuclear generation alongside renewable energy as it pursues its net-zero emissions goals.
In addition to the four-reactor Akkuyu plant, the government plans to build large-scale nuclear power stations in Sinop on the Black Sea coast and in the Thrace region.
It targets 15 gigawatts (GW) of conventional nuclear capacity, while also aiming to install 5 GW of SMR capacity by 2050. Akkuyu will have a combined installed capacity of 4,800 MW.
Although mass-producible SMR-type power plants, which are smaller and less expensive than conventional nuclear power plants that generate thousands of MW of electricity, are viewed as one of the technologies of the future, there are very few operational examples of them worldwide.
Technology platform
IC’s Bayar said the company intends not only to construct SMRs but also to establish a long-term technology platform covering reactor development, licensing, localization, supply chain creation and commercial deployment.
“We want to build not only an SMR project in Türkiye, but also a long-term technology platform for developing, licensing, localizing and commercializing SMR technology,” he told Reuters.
He said IC and ARC are negotiating a licensing agreement focused on commercializing the technology across Türkiye, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, while ARC will concentrate on North American and European markets.
First projects, investment plans
Bayar said he expects the first ARC-based commercial SMR to enter operation in the United States or Canada within four to eight years, with Türkiye’s first project expected to follow.
IC aims to obtain regulatory approval from Türkiye’s Nuclear Regulatory Authority within four years.
Each ARC reactor is designed to generate 100 MW of electricity. Bayar estimated the first plant would require investment of around $500 million, equivalent to $5 million per MW. As the technology matures and production scales up, costs are expected to decline to around $300 million per plant, or $3 million per MW.
While upfront capital costs remain relatively high compared with conventional power plants, Bayar said SMRs are expected to benefit from lower operating costs once commissioned. IC plans to market electricity through bilateral power purchase agreements.
The company expects to serve as the investor, engineering contractor and operator of the first ARC-based SMR in Türkiye.
For future projects, it may participate in one or more of those roles, while also exploring opportunities within the SMR supply chain. However, Bayar said the company does not currently intend to enter the nuclear fuel business.
Türkiye sets nationwide events for 10th anniversary of failed coup
Harsh reaction from Türkiye to the treacherous terrorist act in Damascus: “We stand by brother Syria against the attacks”
Iran to tankers: Use approved Hormuz routes or face ‘forceful response’
Türkiye sets nationwide events for 10th anniversary of failed coup
Harsh reaction from Türkiye to the treacherous terrorist act in Damascus: “We stand by brother Syria against the attacks”
Iran to tankers: Use approved Hormuz routes or face ‘forceful response’
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