Fire in the Gulf: From Tehran to trading floors

The Iran conflict is a multi-market shock that is already reshaping returns, risks, and relative winners across asset classes. The February 2026 U.S.–Israel strikes on Iran represent not just a regional escalation but a global repricing of risk. Conflicts affecting the world’s main energy corridor have global impacts, influencing crude oil, freight, currencies, insurance premiums, aviation costs, and equity markets.

Oil: The Shock in a Barrel

Oil markets are the first to reprice during Middle East conflicts, with other assets following. Iran is located on the northern side of the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical petroleum corridor, which carries about one-fifth of global oil flows. Even without a physical closure, conflict in this area introduces three types of risk to crude prices:

• supply disruption risk
• tanker and transport risk
• geopolitical premium

These risks affect markets in the following ways:

• exporters gain
• importers lose
• Inflation expectations rise

Markets at gunpoint

During this era of high global liquidity, wars rarely close markets. This conflict did, signalling that geopolitics has become a primary driver in finance. Several sovereign exchanges, including the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX), Dubai Financial Market (DFM), Boursa Kuwait, and the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE), have suspended trading due to geopolitical shocks. Exchange shutdowns indicate more than volatility. They signal:
• evaporating liquidity
• impaired price discovery
• systemic fear

Conflict redraws market power

The Iran conflict affects energy, transport corridors, currencies, inflation, and security demand, resulting in a redistribution of gains and losses across sectors and economies. The primary impact is through oil and chokepoint risks: higher energy prices and disrupted routes benefit producers, insurers, and defense providers, while increasing costs for transporters, importers, and consumers.

Higher crude prices shift global terms of trade, moving trade balances from importing to exporting economies and strengthening producer trade balances, fiscal revenues, and energy equities. At the same time, conflict in the Gulf, a key maritime and aviation corridor, increases war-risk premiums, insurance costs, fuel consumption, and rerouting expenses, reducing margins for transport-dependent industries. Currency and inflation effects reinforce this divergence: commodity and safe-haven currencies strengthen, while oil-importing and externally fragile economies experience depreciation and rising price pressures. Increased defense demand further accentuates these differences, as insecurity becomes a monetizable market.

Structural winners

• energy exporters (Gulf, U.S., Canada, Norway)
• energy and commodity equities
• marine insurers and reinsurers
• defense and security firms
• safe-haven currencies (USD, CHF) and commodities (Gold, Silver)
• commodity-linked and Gulf-connected emerging markets

These groups benefit from higher energy prices, increased risk premiums, and greater security demand.

Structural losers

• airlines and aviation networks
• shipping firms and trade-dependent logistics
• oil-importing economies (Europe, India, much of Asia)
• current-account-deficit and high-inflation EMs
• global cyclicals and manufacturing sectors
• inflation-exposed households and consumers

These sectors face higher fuel, insurance, and financing costs, along with weaker currencies and slower growth.

The closure of Gulf exchanges highlights the extent of this redistribution. Markets halt only when liquidity collapses, and price formation fails, a threshold reached when geopolitical risk overwhelms financial systems. The Iran war does more than shift sectoral performance; it shows that conflict can now reallocate capital, currencies, and trade conditions on a global scale.

Africa: Where Oil Pays, and Fuel Hurts

Africa splits along the barrel: exporters gain from higher crude prices; importers absorb the fuel shock.

Source: Mosope Arubayi

The Iran war reinforces a familiar pattern in Africa: resource exporters gain terms of trade, while import-dependent economies face inflation and balance-of-payments pressures. The conflict does not reshape Africa’s economic geography; it amplifies existing trends. Across the continent, the shock is transmitted mainly through oil prices, fuel import bills, shipping costs, and currency pressure. Hydrocarbon exporters benefit from higher crude prices, while fuel-importing and externally fragile economies experience inflation, fiscal strain, and exchange-rate stress.

For Africa’s oil producers, including Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, Libya, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Republic of Congo, the conflict provides an external windfall. Higher crude prices boost export revenues, fiscal balances, and foreign-exchange reserves, easing current-account pressures. Gas exporters such as Algeria and Nigeria gain strategic importance as Europe’s energy security concerns increase, while emerging LNG suppliers like Mozambique see their long-term prospects improve.

The opposite trend affects many of sub-Saharan Africa’s and North Africa’s fuel-importing countries. Economies such as Kenya, Ethiopia, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Morocco, and Tunisia face higher fuel import costs, which widen trade deficits, increase subsidy burdens, and drive domestic inflation. For externally fragile states, including Ghana, Egypt, Kenya, Tunisia, and Ethiopia, higher oil prices worsen current-account and currency vulnerabilities, raise debt-servicing costs, and tighten financial conditions. Manufacturing and transport-dependent economies such as Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt also see margins compressed as energy and shipping costs rise.

Several large economies have mixed positions. South Africa faces higher fuel import costs but partially offsets them with mineral and coal exports. Egypt experiences pressure on fuel and currency but maintains some hedging through gas exports and Suez Canal revenues. Ghana produces oil but often behaves like an importer in macro-financial terms due to its external fragility.

A war that is repricing the World

The Iran war is not an isolated shock but part of a broader shift where chokepoints are weaponized, supply chains become politicized, regional conflicts recur, and security spending increases. Markets are moving from a globalization regime to a geopolitical one, where risk premiums are structural rather than temporary.
The conflict is centered in the Middle East, but its pricing impact is global. Oil prices rise, shipping risks increase, and currencies diverge based on energy exposure. When exchanges halt, geopolitics has already won. In this sense, the Iran war is not only a regional conflict; it is a repricing of the global economy.