Economy
Oil breaches $100 on fresh Middle East flare-up
Brent crude prices surged past $100 a barrel Wednesday for the first time since July 24, as escalating conflict in the Middle East fueled worries about energy-driven inflation and sent global stocks tumbling ahead of several major central bank decisions.
Brent crude futures were up $2.88, or 2.94%, at $100.80 a barrel by 1210 GMT, after earlier touching $100.95. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude was up $2.57, or 2.76%, at $95.60 a barrel, its highest level since early June.
Since the Iran war began on Feb. 28, Brent has surged as high as $126.41 a barrel, a peak reached on April 30.
“The move toward and back above $100 Brent is reflecting a market that increasingly has to change its view on how long the Middle East crisis will continue to curb supply from the region,” said Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank.
This week, attacks by Iran-backed Houthis on Saudi energy facilities set oil installations ablaze, threatening a significant expansion of the conflict.
The attacks also threaten crude shipments via the Red Sea, which has been a key alternative route to the crucial Strait of Hormuz, where oil flows have been severely curtailed.
In a sharp escalation of the six-month-old war, U.S. forces also hit multiple Iranian oil tankers and Iran targeted a U.S. base in Jordan and attacked ships.
Supply risks mount
“Market participants appear to be pricing in a more prolonged conflict in the Middle East as well as the risk that the latest escalation in military strikes disrupts oil flows from the Middle East,” said Hamad Hussain, senior climate and commodities economist at Capital Economics.
“The key risk is whether the recent attacks on oil tankers lead to fewer ship-to-ship transfers taking place in the Gulf of Oman, which have so far played a key role in providing oil to global markets and keeping a lid on prices.”
A tanker carrying about 2 million barrels of Iraqi fuel oil was struck by a drone in Iraqi territorial waters Wednesday, port officials said, while UKMTO, a British navy-linked agency, reported that several merchant vessels in the Gulf had been hit by disabling fire overnight.
In the week before a resumption in fighting on Aug. 30, roughly 8 million to 9 million barrels per day had flowed through Hormuz, double the previous week’s volume, according to Rystad Energy’s Chief Economist Claudio Galimberti. More recently, flows have fallen below 2 million bpd.
Fuels, physical crude oil already above $100
In the physical crude oil market, the dated Brent oil benchmark, against which roughly two-thirds of supply is priced, has been above $100 per barrel since Sept. 3, according to LSEG data.
Physical oil markets react quickly to supply disruptions as buyers need to go into the market to seek alternative cargoes.
Meanwhile, consumers have been paying over $100 for their oil in the form of refined fuels such as gasoline and diesel for most of this year, as conflicts created a global refining crunch which sent fuel prices soaring even relative to crude.
European diesel futures were trading at around $199 per barrel Wednesday, and have not been below $100 per barrel since the start of the Iran war.
Diesel refining margins, or the fuel’s premium to crude, have been at all-time highs since August as fuel shortages gripped markets, touching $78.90 per barrel on Sept. 1.
By contrast, the margin averaged $21 per barrel in 2025 and $19.52 in 2024.
“We’re in a situation where actually, if we had normal refining margins, crude would be the equivalent of about $150,” said Alan Gelder, senior vice-president for refining, chemicals and oil markets at Wood Mackenzie.
Refining is tight globally because of lower exports from the Strait of Hormuz and Russia, and restrained throughputs in Asia, he added.
European gasoline has also been above $100 since March, and its premium to crude neared all-time highs of above $60 per barrel at the start of the month.
In the U.S., consumers faced record gasoline prices over the Labor Day holiday weekend, while diesel prices hit all-time highs last week as supply concerns continued to tighten fuel markets.
“It complicates the picture because central banks around the world are trying to grapple with high inflation,” said Nitesh Shah, commodity strategist at WisdomTree.
Stocks under pressure
Stock markets across the globe were also under pressure Wednesday, as the latest surge in energy prices drives concerns that higher inflation will prompt central banks to keep monetary policy tighter for longer.
U.S. stock index futures fell about half a percent, setting Wall Street indexes up for a third consecutive day of losses.
The pan-European STOXX 600 index dropped 1.5% by 1123 GMT, on course for its biggest percentage drop in two months, with economically sensitive banking and industrial stocks among the top decliners.
“$100 is a round number, a psychological number, but the break-even point of oil prices for the developed markets is much higher,” said Societe Generale multi-asset strategist Manish Kabra. “We think crude needs to hit $150 to create a major drawback in demand cycle.”
However, Kabra cautioned that if price margins for refined products did not decline, “then diesel prices go up and there tends to be a trickle-down impact on inflation and services.”
U.S. inflation test, rate hike bets
The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield, the benchmark for global borrowing costs, traded at 4.808%. It touched a near three-year high of 4.818% last week as traders ramped up expectations of a tighter monetary policy.
U.S. producer and consumer price reports, set to be released later this week, are seen as a real test for those bets, with policymakers looking for further evidence that inflation pressures are continuing to cool.
Traders assign close to 60% odds for a quarter-point hike or a hold from the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) next week, while being all but certain of a quarter-point increase from the Bank of Japan (BOJ) two days later.
The yen strengthened toward the nearly seven-month high touched against the dollar Tuesday as traders exited short positions in the Japanese currency. Expectations are building for faster BOJ hikes and a potential rush of repatriation of Japanese capital.
The euro edged higher ahead of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) policy decision Thursday, with markets widely expecting a hike amid inflationary pressures from the Iran war. The currency rose to a more than one-week high of $1.16493.
Both Japan and the eurozone are energy importers.
Sterling edged 0.1% higher at $1.3558. The Bank of England (BoE) is due to announce its latest policy decision next Thursday, with economists predicting the key rate will be on hold for the remainder of this year.
Gold gained 1.1% to around $4,403 an ounce.
Airlines stepped up their criticism of Britain’s aviation systems Wednesday after a major air traffic control failure stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers, while ministers summoned the head of flight control to explain the shutdown.
Flights resumed at major airports across the country after the hours-long outage Tuesday, which resulted in the cancelation of 2,000 flights and ramped up pressure on air traffic control provider NATS and its boss Martin Rolfe.
Ryanair said NATS had told it that the cause of the shutdown was the same problem behind the last major air traffic outage in 2023, which cost airlines 100 million pounds ($135 million). The carrier has repeatedly called for Rolfe to step down.
Transport minister Heidi Alexander will later Wednesday hear directly from Rolfe after she summoned him to explain the fault, amid concerns over the resilience of the infrastructure and technology.
The NATS shutdown in August 2023 caused travel chaos, and there was also a radar-related technical issue in July 2025, which affected major airports including Britain’s largest, Heathrow.
“I am seeking assurances that lessons will be learned and systems that support aviation are up to the job,” Alexander said on the social media platform X.
‘Absolute rerun’ of 2023 meltdown
Michael O’Leary, group CEO of Ryanair, which is Europe’s biggest airline, told Reuters the outage was “an absolute rerun” of what happened in 2023, when a rogue flight plan caused the shutdown.
“Fire him. He’s been there since 2015. He is useless,” he said of Rolfe.
Apologizing to those affected by the issue, Rolfe had earlier said that the problem was not the same as in 2023.
“This will be something different that we’ve never seen in 50 years of operation,” he told BBC Radio, adding that NATS had ruled out a cyberattack.
Aviation analytics company Cirium confirmed about 2,000 flights to and from U.K. airports had been affected by the outage Tuesday and Wednesday combined, with 30% of scheduled departures grounded Tuesday and 5% Wednesday.
Ryanair, which said Britain’s air traffic services routinely underperformed those in other European countries, said its losses from Tuesday’s outage were 3 million pounds so far, after it canceled 260 flights affecting 48,000 passengers.
British Airways Tuesday canceled or diverted 100 flights with tens of thousands impacted, and said Wednesday 190 flights had been canceled as disruption continued.
As operations restarted, Britain’s main airports – including London’s major Heathrow and Gatwick hubs – said passengers should check with their airline before heading to the airport as schedules would have changed.
“We are expecting knock-on impacts as aircraft and crew reposition,” the U.K.’s busiest hub said in a statement.
NATS, a public-private partnership which is partially owned by airlines including British Airways and easyJet, pension funds and the government, paid its owners dividends of 175 million pounds in 2025.
Ryanair is suing NATS at London’s High Court and seeking over 7 million pounds over the 2023 outage and has called on NATS to reinvest its profits into performance improvements and hiring more staff.
Türkiye and Russia have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on mineral fertilizer shipments to strengthen Türkiye’s access to fertilizers and related raw materials, Agriculture and Forestry Minister Ibrahim Yumaklı said Tuesday.
“We are increasing the diversity of our sources against potential risks to fertilizer supplies caused by wars and conflicts in our region,” Yumaklı said on Turkish social media platform NSosyal.
The memorandum of understanding with Russia will further secure Türkiye’s supplies of fertilizers and fertilizer raw materials, he added.
The minister said Türkiye is taking strategic steps to ensure farmers’ uninterrupted and sustainable access to agricultural inputs in line with the country’s planned production targets.
He added that the agreement would support agricultural production and contribute to the uninterrupted supply of products to the market.
Türkiye will soon begin drilling a challenging oil-targeted well in the western Black Sea, Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said Wednesday, the latest in the country’s efforts to expand domestic hydrocarbon reserves.
“We will start an oil-targeted drilling operation in the western Black Sea soon. It will be a difficult drilling operation and will take some time,” Bayraktar told private broadcaster CNBC-e.
Türkiye has expanded its offshore exploration capabilities in recent years, increasing its deep-water drilling fleet to six vessels. One of the vessels is currently operating in Somalia, while others are conducting exploration and production-development activities in the Black Sea.
Ankara has previously said it plans six exploration wells across the western, central and eastern Black Sea in 2026 as it seeks new oil and natural gas discoveries.
Black Sea output to double
Bayraktar said Türkiye plans to double the production capacity from its vast Black Sea reserve by the end of this year.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced the discovery of 320 billion cubic meters of gas in August 2020. The estimate was later revised upward to 405 billion cubic meters. Further discoveries in 2021, 2022 and 2025 brought the total estimated Black Sea gas reserves to 785 billion cubic meters.
Gas reached the shore in April 2023, and locally produced gas was fed into the national transmission network in late August the same year, after processing at a facility at a port in northern Zonguldak province.
As of May this year, Sakarya accounted for 92% of Türkiye’s total domestic gas production. Current production stands at around 9.5 million cubic meters per day, enough to meet the natural gas needs of approximately 4 million households.
This year’s output increase will lift that figure to 8 million households, Bayraktar said.
Production is then targeted to quadruple by 2028. At that point, Türkiye expects to produce around 16 billion to 17 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually from its Black Sea fields, equivalent to roughly 80% of the gas it currently imports from Russia.
The Black Sea gas project is a central part of Türkiye’s strategy to reduce its dependence on imported energy while diversifying supply sources and infrastructure.
Türkiye has also expanded LNG regasification capacity and aims to raise its daily gasification capacity to 200 million cubic meters. It has increased pipeline connections with neighboring countries and is seeking to develop additional routes for gas imports and exports.
Transit hub
Bayraktar said Türkiye had been pursuing a comprehensive strategy for gas exploration since 2016 under its National Energy and Mining Policy, with the Black Sea discoveries emerging as one of the main results.
The government is also seeking to diversify energy supply routes and strengthen Türkiye’s role as an energy transit hub. It is discussing a potential pipeline route that could carry Qatari gas through Türkiye to European markets.
Bayraktar said Türkiye was also looking to increase oil flows through its territory from the Gulf region. If Iraq and Kuwait were able to route part of their production away from the Strait of Hormuz, he said Türkiye could potentially handle as much as 2.5 million barrels per day for delivery to Europe.
COP31, energy transition
Bayraktar’s comments came as Türkiye prepares to host this year’s U.N.-backed climate summit in southern Antalya in November.
He said Türkiye’s main message at the COP31 would be to move from commitments to concrete action on climate change, while acknowledging the challenge posed by global energy security pressures.
The minister pointed to oil prices that surpassed $100 a barrel Wednesday amid escalation in attacks between Iran and the United States. That, along with an increase in global coal use, makes it more difficult to prioritize the climate agenda, said Bayraktar.
At the same time, Bayraktar said Türkiye needed to pursue energy security and the transition to cleaner energy simultaneously.
He said Türkiye was targeting a 35% share of electrification by 2035 and was preparing for a sharp increase in electricity demand driven by urbanization, artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and cooling needs.
Türkiye will need significant investment in its electricity transmission network through 2035, he added, as it seeks to connect areas with abundant generation to regions where demand is rising.
Works on 2nd, 3rd nuclear plants moving quickly
Bayraktar also said that work with Canada on Türkiye’s planned second and third nuclear power plants was moving quickly, adding that he hoped for a clearer picture on the matter in the coming months.
Türkiye is months away from the planned launch of the initial reactor of its first nuclear power plant, Akkuyu. The four-reactor plant is being built by Russia’s state-owned nuclear company Rosatom in the southern Mersin province.
Akkuyu’s four reactors will have a combined installed capacity of 4,800 megawatts (MW). Once all units are operational, it is expected to supply about 10% of Türkiye’s electricity demand.
Ankara plans to construct two additional plants, one in Sinop on the Black Sea coast and in the Thrace region.
Bayraktar said Ankara was still in talks with China, Russia and South Korea on the nuclear power plant projects in northwestern Türkiye.
Airbnb and other short-term rental platforms are set to face tighter restrictions after the European Commission proposed new rules Wednesday to help authorities address housing shortages in tourism-heavy areas.
The move by the EU executive aims to harmonize rules across Europe after authorities in cities including Paris, Barcelona and Venice turned to a raft of diverse rules to crack down on Airbnb, which subsequently triggered legal challenges.
The shortage of affordable housing due to the surge in short-term holiday rentals has prompted residents, especially young Europeans, to take to the streets to protest.
“A year ago, I promised to tackle Europe’s housing affordability,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement.
“Today, we are taking one step in this direction. By providing more clarity and support to local authorities and communities, anchored in local realities,” she said.
The proposal, which will need to be agreed with EU countries and the European Parliament in the coming months before it can become law, provides a first-ever common European framework for assessing housing measures.
The Commission said authorities can identify areas with a housing squeeze by checking whether the price-to-income level is high or if there has been an upward trend for the past 10 years.
It said any subsequent restrictions against short-term rentals must be based on evidence, necessary and limited to the affected areas, and not be retroactive.
Airbnb echoed comments made by lobbying group CCIA Europe, which called for independent scrutiny of restrictions or effective redress. The company said the crux of the problem is the short supply of housing.
“That means focusing it (the regulation) where the shortage actually is: construction, renovation, and the homes standing empty across Europe today,” George Mavros, Airbnb’s head of government affairs for the European Union, said in a blog post.
CCIA Europe’s head of policy, Alexandre Roure, criticized the EU proposal to allow cities to police their own compliance.
“Without independent scrutiny or effective redress, this proposal will remain a paper tiger, leaving disproportionate restrictions in place and undermining the legal certainty the Affordable Housing Act is meant to provide,” he said.
It will be up to authorities to decide whether to take action. The proposal also recommends authorities unlock land for housing and modernize the planning and construction process.
Türkiye’s national flag carrier served 5.4% more passengers in the first eight months of 2026 compared to a year ago, according to data released on Tuesday.
The number of passengers Turkish Airlines (THY) carried in the January-August period reached 64 million, the company said in a filing with the Public Disclosure Platform (KAP).
The carrier served 10 million passengers in August, an increase of 5.6% from the same month last year, the data showed.
The number of international passengers increased 6.1% year-over-year in the first eight months to 41.8 million, while domestic passenger traffic rose 4.3% to 22.2 million.
Last month, international passenger numbers rose 5% to 6.4 million, while domestic passenger traffic increased 6.8% to 3.6 million.
THY’s passenger load factor climbed to 84.7% in the January-August period from 82.7% a year earlier. The factor reached 88% in August, up from 86.6% a year earlier.
The international load factor stood at 84.5%, while the domestic load factor was 86.5%. The international load factor last month was 87.6%, while the domestic load factor stood at 91.3%.
The number of destinations served by Turkish Airlines increased to 358 from 353, while its fleet expanded by 13% to 566 aircraft from 501.
An artificial intelligence researcher who left OpenAI to join Anthropic has decided to leave the industry, accusing both U.S. companies of recklessness and of “playing with our lives” in the race to develop AI models capable of self-improvement.
Jacob Coxon spent the past three years pretraining AI models, first at OpenAI and then, this year, at its fiercest rival Anthropic. Pretraining is the stage where AI models absorb vast quantities of data.
“Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote Tuesday on the social media platform X.
Superintelligence is the theoretical point when AI’s capabilities exceed human intelligence.
The 27-year-old Briton’s warnings add to signs of mounting safety concerns within top AI companies.
Coxon cautioned that the power of the AI technology should not be underestimated. He said these would soon be able to “hack everything” and have the ability to “acquire real power and resources.”
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he said. “This is not a marketing stunt.”
Over 10% chance of killing humanity
He separately told The Wall Street Journal that under the “most aggressive scenarios” things could already spiral out of control by the end of next year. A central danger is that AI can develop on its own, making it harder to control, he said.
Anthropic safety executive Evan Hubinger, who is partly responsible for ensuring AI remains aligned with human interests, backed up Coxon.
“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” he said, adding that he personally thought the risk of AI killing humanity over the coming decade was more than 10%.
Hubinger said Anthropic is “trying its best,” but does not yet have a plan to ensure an AI system that surpasses human capabilities would obey its creators. He said there was a “low” risk of that happening with current models.
On Sunday, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, called for “extreme caution.” He wrote in a blog post that he was concerned nobody was prepared for a rapid advance in AI capabilities.
“International coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world,” Pachocki said.
AI models are not regulated by federal law in the United States.
In September, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democratic Rep. Greg Casar introduced a bill seeking to suspend AI development until a federal regulator is created.
Pachocki said history has reached a moment in which machine intelligence was beginning to surpass that of humans.
The OpenAI executive described in greater detail why modern AI systems were harder to control. He said AI has been allowed to “grow” rather than being designed.
AI systems were a product of complex processes. “Our large-scale training runs are experiments and we are sometimes surprised by their results.”
And the more machines’ capabilities surpassed human ones, the more difficult it would be to understand what they were capable of.
At the same time, Pachocki sees an argument for continuing rapid research, as developing AI intelligence could defend against the dangers posed by other AI.
It would be needed, among other things, to protect infrastructure and develop entirely new defense mechanisms.
Wake-up call
Coxon’s resignation comes as Anthropic prepares for its market debut, following a summer marked by unauthorized hacks carried out by so-called AI agents, which independently broke into other companies’ systems in test runs in a wake-up call for the industry.
AI leaders say so-called “recursive self-improvement,” a stage where AI systems could essentially design and train the next generation of AI with little human involvement, is drawing near.
Coxon considers Anthropic’s efforts genuine but said he believes no company can responsibly develop an AI that surpasses humans without government intervention or a coordinated slowdown.
“At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first – they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk,” he said.
In February, Anthropic removed a pledge from its safety charter to halt the development of its models if it failed to control their risks.
It argued that if it unilaterally paused its work, its less cautious rivals would dominate the industry, making it less safe overall.
At the end of July, more than 1,000 tech industry employees, including Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, called on Washington to support a coordinated slowdown in the development of the most advanced AI systems.
The AI agents are programs that are intended to carry out tasks independently for users.
In a test at OpenAI, one model found a way to get from an ostensibly isolated test environment onto the open internet and then hacked the computer system of the AI platform Hugging Face.
It did this while trying to find a solution to a task assigned, but the incident showed just how far AI systems can go off on their own unexpectedly without their developers noticing.
It also recently emerged that OpenAI’s AI agents had already misused a German-language wiki page on a large scale in the spring to coordinate among themselves. The EU said it was looking into the incident.
OpenAI halted training of its latest models for two weeks in August before resuming it under tighter controls.
A current protective mechanism used by AI developers is requiring models with AI to explain their actions in human language.
In test runs, the AI agents used the communication option to exchange answers to questions they were asked with each other via notes on the wiki page.
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