00:00Oil is flat this morning as traders monitor efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
00:05Fresh attacks on tankers and energy infrastructure have kept the market on edge.
00:10And Treasury Secretary Scott Besson says the U.S. will roll out unprecedented economic measures against Iran next week.
00:19So for more on all of this, we're now joined by Stuart Livingstone, Wallace, Bloomberg's head of the Middle East
00:24and North Africa.
00:26Sir, the U.S. is resorting to economic pressure, not just Scott Besson saying this, President Trump also bringing back
00:33that argument.
00:34So what else do we know about what kind of economic pressure the U.S. is thinking about?
00:39So, I mean, look, we don't know because it's coming next week.
00:42And it's going to be very hard to guess in advance because Iran is probably one of the most sanctioned
00:46countries on the planet.
00:48You know, they've had four plus decades of sanctioning thousands of individuals, more or less shopping off all trades.
00:54So we presume they'll go after shadow banking.
00:56We presume they'll go after crypto if they can.
00:58That's a very difficult one.
00:59But that clearly is, you know, heavily relied on by the Iranians and potentially third party as well.
01:05You know, so-called secondary sanctions.
01:07So they go after the trade partners.
01:08But the difficulty they face is there are fewer and fewer countries now trading with Iran.
01:14You know, I think everyone kind of got the message that they're going to be cut out of the SWIFT
01:17system if that continued.
01:19So we'll see what they come up with.
01:20And that deal between Iran and Iran, it's been in final stages for the past, for the final stages of
01:27us discussing it.
01:28What exactly is happening there?
01:30Again, we don't particularly know the details of it.
01:33We presume there's some to and fro over the details with regard to authority, who gets to make final decisions,
01:39potentially about how you collect fees.
01:41But there may also be an issue here with who exactly signs off on the deal.
01:44So I think from the Omani side, that's fairly straightforward from the Iranian side, you've seen over the last week,
01:50there's been a whole raft of appointments and reappointments and people demoted and promoted.
01:54So there clearly is a fairly serious change of control within Iran.
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