World’s oil buffer runs dangerously low until Hormuz fully reopens, Aramco CEO says

Running short

The world’s oil stockpiles have become “scarily thin,” and markets remain exposed until Hormuz fully reopens, Bloomberg quotes Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser as saying at the Energy Intelligence Forum. His warning comes days after the G7 agreed to release up to 100 mn barrels of diesel and crude over four months to ease fuel prices.

Fewer than 6 bn barrels of commercial inventories remain, from almost 10 bn when the war began, Nasser said. Less than 10% of the world’s inventories are practically available because of technical restrictions, he added, which leaves a far smaller cushion than the headline figure suggests.

Emergency releases will not close the gap between supply and demand, Nasser warned. Rebuilding stocks would add at least 2 mn bbl / d of demand and could take up to two years, with more needed if governments hold larger reserves.

More crude is moving, but prices are not coming down. Seven major Gulf producers were set to ship 12.8 mn bbl / d in September, still some 6 mn bbl / d below February levels. Brent has traded around USD 100 per barrel over the past month, Nasser said, with Iranian attacks on ships in the strait and proxy attacks on Aramco infrastructure keeping supply risks in focus. Refined fuel prices have risen even more sharply than crude, he said.

Citizenship revoked

. Six decrees published on Sunday in the official gazette, Kuwait Al Youm, stripped 415 people of their nationality, including billionaire Mahmoud Haji Haidar, The National reports. Haidar chairs Zumurrud Holding and holds stakes in several Kuwaiti banks.

Haidar is an outlier in a campaign that has hit mostly ordinary citizens. Kuwait has revoked the citizenship of almost 50k people since the start of the campaign in 2024, in a review officials said left “no one exempt.” It stripped more than 2k alone in June this year. Most of those affected were women naturalised through marriage, and campaigners put the real total at up to 250k.

Business licenses can follow passports out the door: Al Sabah’s newspaper and TV channel went dark three days after the state stripped its owner Barakat Al Rashidi of his citizenship. While media licenses are an extreme case because they require Kuwaiti ownership on national security grounds, losing citizenship has consequences for commercial ventures and investors, with the law now giving those affected five years to adjust their holdings to foreign ownership laws.

What’s next: Haidar can appeal to the citizenship grievance committee. The bigger question is how his property and bank holdings will be restructured to meet national regulations for foreign ownership and investments.

Still swinging

LIV Golf may have a new savior: BC Partners Credit has made an initial committed investment in LIV Golf, part of a targeted USD 300 mn in financing to help the league emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy ahead of next year’s season, Reuters reports, citing a company statement. The funding — which still requires court approval — will support LIV’s next phase, during which players would become equity owners of both the league and its teams, the company said.

ICYMI- LIV Golf filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last month, with USD mns in unpaid debts to top players. This came months after the Public Investment Fund pulled the plug on the project, saying it would stop funding after the 2026 season concludes.

No warning next time

Banque Misr got a 30-day public review period; the next financial institution still doing business with Iran may not — or so seems to be the message the US Treasury is sending to financial institutions in its latest statement on Monday. The statement put foreign financial institutions on notice, warning them that upcoming sanctions could be imposed without prior notice.

The move escalates pressure on global banks to sever remaining ties with Iran-linked financial networks, closing off some of the key grey zones where some institutions had operated with de facto tolerance. The measure is part of a wider campaign against the Iranian government under the banner of “Operation Economic Outcast,” which began on 24 August.

While Banque Misr’s UAE operation was the first publicly named financial sector target, the first definitive sanctions landed on Turkish player Golden Global Bank and its subsidiaries one week later. The decision against Banque Misr, if it enters force, would cut the bank’s UAE branches off US correspondent banking, making it virtually impossible to meet its USD commitments. The US gave a 30-day window for public comments, which ended on 1 October, and it’s not clear yet whether the Treasury Department would move ahead with the decision — the National Bank of Egypt has made a bid to acquire Banque Misr’s UAE operations late in September, which experts previously described to us as a “political” solution to the threat of sanctions.

Braving the strait

Kuwait is now producing oil at 75% of its pre-conflict rate as more tankers brave Hormuz, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation CEO Sheikh Nawaf Al Sabah tells Bloomberg. Kuwait — which, alongside Iraq, is considered one of the most Hormuz-dependent producers — is now producing 2 mn bbl / d, a sharp recovery from when output collapsed to below 1 mn bbl / d in the early months of the Iran war. Kuwait produced 2.6 mn bbl / d before the war.

Data point

8.9% — that’s how much Turkey’s trade deficit widened y-o-y in 9M 2026, according to our calculations. The country’s import bill rose 5.3% y-o-y during the first nine months of the year to USD 250.79 bn, while its exports increased at a slower pace of 4.0% to USD 185.0 bn, according to a Trade Ministry bulletin. Some 3.9% of total exports came from the country’s defense and aerospace industry, with the total value of the industry’s exports rising 30% y-o-y to USD 10.9 bn, Presidency of Defense Industries head Haluk Görgün said.