Brent Crude Spikes to $108.59, a Five-Month High, Then Slides Back to $105 as Wall Street's Losing Streak Hits Asia

Brent crude has kept climbing as U.S.-Iran tensions intensified. Early Friday it went further than it has all week: Brent touched $108.59 a barrel, its highest price since May, according to the Associated Press. By later Friday morning the rally had partly reversed, with Brent trading around $105.14, down 2.3% on the day. U.S. crude followed the same arc, rising as high as $103.22 before dropping 2% to $100.46.

The swing happened inside a single trading session, and it shows up in real time across wire coverage. Outlets that ran the AP story earlier in the morning, including ABC News, The Independent and Breitbart, reported Brent still climbing above $108. Outlets that picked up the updated wire copy later, including Click on Detroit, KRMG, 2news.com and Newsday, reported the pullback to $105. Both numbers are accurate. They're just from different points in a volatile morning.

Oil is still up sharply from where it started the year. It was around $72 a barrel in late February, before the war began, according to the AP.

Wall Street's Losing Streak Spreads to Asia

The S&P 500 dropped 0.6% Thursday, its fourth straight loss, according to the Associated Press. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.6% and the Nasdaq composite lost 0.7%.

Asian markets took the hit Friday. Japan's Nikkei 225 dropped as much as 2.8% before settling down 1.9% to 64,011.34. SoftBank Group, an investor in OpenAI, fell close to 4%. South Korea's Kospi lost between 1.8% and 2.3%, with Samsung Electronics down as much as 3.9% and SK Hynix down as much as 3.6%. Hong Kong's Hang Seng slipped roughly 0.7% to 0.8%, and the Shanghai Composite dropped 1.2% to 1.8%.

One bright spot: shares of Chinese AI chipmaker Enflame surged around 179% to 180% in its Shanghai trading debut, per the AP report carried across multiple outlets. That's a single-stock story, not a market trend, given the broader regional selloff around it.

Inflation Runs Hot, CPI Still to Come

The U.S. producer price index for August came in up 5.4% year-over-year, accelerating from July's 4.8%, according to the Associated Press. That's wholesale inflation moving in the wrong direction.

The Labor Department's August consumer price index is scheduled for release Friday, ahead of the Federal Reserve's meeting next week. That number hasn't been reported yet. Investors are watching it closely because it will shape how the Fed handles rates at a meeting where its own officials appear split.

The Epoch Times reported that Fed Governor Christopher Waller struck a dovish tone in early September, signaling support for holding rates steady after citing progress on inflation, which caught markets off guard following what The Epoch Times described as a more hawkish tone from Fed Chair Kevin Warsh at the Jackson Hole gathering. That internal disagreement sets up next week's meeting as a genuine test of which view wins out, especially with producer prices now running at 5.4%.

Yields Near 5%, Dollar Slips

The 10-year Treasury yield rose to 4.96% early Friday before easing slightly to around 4.94%, up from 4.83% on Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. The AP attributed the volatility to higher energy prices, inflation pressure, and rising U.S. government debt. A 10-year yield near 5% means higher borrowing costs on everything from mortgages to federal debt service, at a time when Washington is already running large deficits.

The dollar slipped against the yen, trading between 154.18 and 154.35 yen, down from 154.42. The euro edged down slightly to between $1.1605 and $1.1609 from $1.1612.

The Hormuz Question Nobody Has Answered

ING commodities strategists Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey wrote Friday that oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz remains "well below pre-war levels," calling that "underscoring how fragile the situation has become," according to the Associated Press.

Some analysts argue the market is overreacting to headline risk given that actual physical shipments, while reduced, haven't collapsed entirely. But a fair counterpoint is that reduced flow through the world's most important oil chokepoint, even short of a full blockade, is itself the risk markets are pricing in, not a false alarm.

Yu Song, chief China economist at UBS Securities, said in a commentary cited by the Associated Press that even if oil prices retreat as tensions ease, they're likely to stay elevated for the rest of the year, adding to inflation uncertainty. Investors are watching Friday's CPI report and next week's Fed decision with no resolution yet on Hormuz shipping volumes or the underlying U.S.-Iran standoff driving the whole move.