Oil prices see-sawed throughout the day Tuesday as a wave of headlines lifted prices, only to have them move lower again within hours.
Crude’s first big jump of the day came while President Donald Trump was addressing the U.N. General Assembly.
“I believe we will make a deal right after the election because it does not make sense for them not to,” Trump told assembled world leaders.
What markets heard, however, was that there would be no deal before Nov. 3. By the time Trump had finished speaking, prices for both U.S. crude oil and Brent had risen overall for the day.
But they didn’t stay there for long.
During a later meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump announced that his team had just concluded a “very good” three-hour meeting with Iran’s representatives.
Trump’s top foreign policy negotiator Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were the two envoys in the meeting, he said.
The talks appeared to represent genuine progress, sending oil prices down again around 1%.
Global crude prices were also falling in part Tuesday on momentum from reports that Iran had offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within days if the U.S. agreed to take steps toward easing pressure on the country.
NBC News has not confirmed this offer, and Fars, Iran’s semi-official news agency, knocked the reports down. “Iranian sources have described these reports as unreliable and untrue,” Fars reported, but did not identify who those sources were.
Trump will be holding a number of meetings with world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, including one with Gulf Cooperation Council leaders on Tuesday night.
Along with tumbling oil prices, bond yields also fell Tuesday. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield, which heavily influences consumer borrowing rates, fell to as low as 4.92% after climbing as high as 5.04% a week ago. That was its highest level since 2007.
The 30-year Treasury yield also dipped to as low as 5.25% Tuesday morning. Last week, it hit 5.4%, a level not seen since 2007.
On Sunday, Trump had signaled a willingness to meet with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC News on Tuesday that there was nothing “scheduled at this point.”
The U.S., however, would be “open to something like that,” he said.
In the seven months since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, vessel traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has ground to a near halt at times. Traffic did not exceed 20 ships per day over the last week, according to data from MarineTraffic.
Hormuz’s central role in facilitating tanker traffic also helps explain why investors were relieved Tuesday by reports that Saudi Arabia’s key east-west pipeline might be back in operation sooner than expected.
On Sept. 11, the Saudi Energy Ministry said that the pipeline had been shut after “multiple attacks” amid the kingdom’s escalating conflict with the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.
Experts initially feared the closure could last months, cutting off a vital workaround for oil exports while Hormuz remains unstable.
Reuters reported that the pipeline had already restarted and could resume exports from a Red Sea port later in the day, citing three people familiar with the matter. Bloomberg News reported that Saudi Arabia was running tests on the pipeline in the hopes of restarting it this week, citing multiple people familiar with the matter.
The state oil company that operates the pipeline, Saudi Aramco, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News.
“If you look at the increases we’ve seen in just the last two weeks, the enormous majority of that increase is because the Houthis attacked a Saudi pipeline and the Saudis had to shut down that pipeline,” Rubio said Tuesday on NBC’s “TODAY.”
“So there’s still oil in the system, but the markets are reacting to the expectation that there will not be as much Saudi oil in the future” as a result of the pipeline attack, Rubio added. “That is a problem, as well, that we are confronting here.”
The price per barrel of both oil benchmarks are up more than 60% since the start of the year. So are retail gas prices, which reached $4.47 per gallon on Tuesday. That’s 50% higher than it was when the Iran war began.
The price of diesel has also skyrocketed.
The national average hit a new all-time high of $6.52 per gallon Tuesday, up 82% since the start of the year on a record run propelled in part by intensifying aerial attacks between Russia and Ukraine. Trump is set to hold talks with Zelenskyy on Tuesday as he pushes for an energy truce.
Despite the overall rise in oil and gas prices this month, Trump nonetheless claimed in his UNGA speech that “oil prices will come plummeting down, even lower than they were at the start of the conflict” as soon as the war is over.
Experts doubt that.
At the beginning of the month, multiple Wall Street commodities analysts warned that oil prices could rise to $120 or even $150 per barrel if the Iran war drags on and more energy infrastructure is damaged.
Stocks reacted little to the flood of energy-related headlines Tuesday. The S&P 500 closed flat, while the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.4%. This followed a banner trading day Monday driven by falling oil prices and bond yields.
