From a fragile calm to oil prices spiking again.
It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service.
I'm Leanna Byrne.
Bangladesh is feeling the squeeze with fuel prices jumping and queues stretching for hours.
Also, fresh questions about insider trading on the back of Trump announcements.
All right.
Tensions between the US and Iran took a turn for the worse over the weekend, which means global financial markets have gone south too.
American forces attacked and then seized an Iranian cargo ship just east of the Strait of Hormuz.
The US military has released a video of what it says is the moment the confrontation began.
OK, we gave a flare-up.
Iran has responded to the seizure by saying it will retaliate.
All of this has wiped out much of the optimism we saw in the markets last week.
Rachel Winter is a partner and investment manager at Killik & Co.
Rachel, can you give us an update on the price of oil?
Yeah, so it's up about 5% at the moment, but it's still below $95 per barrel.
And that means it's quite far below 100 per barrel, which is seen as quite an important psychological level.
Yeah, that's where we were last week.
So we're not there right yet.
How about global markets?
How are they faring?
They're faring reasonably well.
So the S&P 500 is down about 0.5% at the moment.
So it's not a huge move in that downwards direction.
And it is still above that 7,000 level, which is seen as being relatively high.
So we're not seeing signs of panic at the moment.
No.
And Rachel, why are they not doing worse?
Some analysts are wondering that.
Well, I think both sides keep making threats, but then returning to that negotiation table.
So I think there is still some optimism that a deal will be reached at some point.
All right, we'll take that.
Rachel Winter, thank you so much for joining us.
And those rising oil prices we've been talking about are continuing to have real life consequences in Bangladesh, for example.
The government raised retail fuel prices by 10 to 15 percent over the weekend, and this was the result.
Arguments and frayed tempers at a petrol station in the capital Dhaka, with some motorists waiting hours, even overnight, just to fill their tanks.
Earlier I spoke to Salman Syed, a freelance journalist in the capital Dhaka.
I went to the pumps in the heart of Dhaka city, a place called Asad Gate, just near the parliament building.
I've seen these long queues, still like every day.
We are watching these people are waiting the motorbike riders and the drivers who's been waiting for hours and hours.
These lines are like more than a kilometre long.
Drivers are waiting here since like, you know, more than five, six hours.
Some are waiting for more than 10 hours.
By the time they reach to the pump, sometimes the fuel gets over.
So the pump shuts down and then they have to wait for the next lot to come in.
And there's no food, nothing.
A lot of people are complaining about that.
I also spoke with some of the riders just a few hours back, and this is what they had to say.
My name is Mushfiq Nizam Shukta and I'm a fitness trainer.
Before work, I need less than five or ten minutes to get the food.
And nowadays, like more than two to three hours.
So from my life, two to three hours is wasted.
Every day or every month, I have to be here like two to three times.
Maybe temporarily I have to ride cycle for my transportation.
I'm a business manager of a corporate IT company.
Because of this oil crisis, I have to travel with bus.
That took me three to four hours and it's really, what can I say, really harmful.
I left my office at 2 p.m., but my working hour is to the 5 p.m.
Three hours I killed, so I lost my business.
So that's affecting my corporate life, my regular life, along with the financial life.
So it's hard.
It's really hard.
Can you put these numbers into context for us?
A 10 to 15 percent hike.
How significant is that for the average household or driver in Dhaka?
The government says it's not going to be a big effect.
It won't create a big impact on the commodity prices.
But people in reality has already started feeling the effect.
Transport prices have increased, and then people are buying fuel from the black market which is of double the price.
Bus transportations have been increased.
People are not getting enough transport to move around from their home to their workstations.
Every day, our social media is feeding off with the fights that's taking place across the country in different pumps.
Some of them are not getting enough oil that they wanted.
Like suppose a car needs 10 liters or 20 liters of octane, but they're only getting five to six liters.
So these kind of frustration is still on for some people who are who has job, regular job.
They can't even go to their jobs because they have to wait for hours, more than 10 hours, in these queues.
Business people are also losing a lot of their jobs because the markets are shutting down early now.
So by the time people are finishing up their office hours, they don't get to go to do the shoppings.
I'm Salman Sayyed in the Bangladesh capital, Dhaka.
France has summoned Elon Musk for questioning over his social media platform X as part of a growing criminal investigation.
Prosecutors want to speak to him today on a voluntary basis, but it's unclear if he'll show up.
They're looking at claims the platform's algorithm may have skewed political content in France, along with concerns over data use and the spread of deep fakes linked to its AI chatbot Grok.
X denies any wrongdoing.
Now, this is a story that's been quietly building in financial markets.
Traders placing big bets just before major announcements by US President Donald Trump, including during the Iran war.
And now new BBC analysis suggests it may be happening more often than we thought.
I spoke to the BBC's business reporter, Nick Marsh, who's been investigating.
23rd of March, Trump had spent the weekend threatening Iran's power plants.
Suddenly, on the Monday on the 23rd, before the stock market in the US opened, he posted on Truth Social that the US had had very good and productive conversations with Tehran over what he called a complete and total resolution to hostilities.
That was at the time very surprising.
So oil dropped a lot.
It dropped by 14%.
But then if you go back and look at the trading volume data, you see this massive spike in the numbers of contracts that were exchanged.
In the case of Brent Crude, 16 minutes before, you see $170 million worth of trades.
In the case of the US trader WTI, 14 minutes before the post came out, you see 150 million.
So, you know, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars.
Those traders will have made a huge amount of money.
We don't know who these people were.
We don't know what information, if any, they acted on.
But it was an unusual trade for that time of day.
And I found that this happened on more than one occasion.
Yeah, it's interesting.
And some of your examples, we're not talking hours, like you said, we're talking minutes.
How unusual is that in normal market conditions?
And is it the same kind of behavior each time?
Well, I'm not an oil trader.
So I spoke to oil traders, oil analysts, and they pretty much all said yeah, this is very unusual.
These are abnormal trades.
You do have people who put forward the argument, not unfounded, that...
Market analysts are getting pretty good at predicting when Donald Trump might say something momentous.
You know, that is part of reading the market.
But it's the frequency with which these spikes appear to be happening, particularly on the oil futures market, that have raised eyebrows.
Are there regulators looking into this and has there been any response to this?
Yeah, so the only people really who know who has made these trades are the traders themselves.
And then it's the regulators because yes, they do have the power to investigate and they do have the power to identify who made certain trades and in what circumstances.
I have reached out to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, who look after the oil futures market.
I didn't get a response, but their chair has been talking recently about the need to crack down more on insider trading.
The general message is that, yes, we are watching and we won't tolerate insider trading.
We have approached the White House.
The White House didn't respond to our request for comment, but you've got spokespeople from the White House in the past who have made it clear they strenuously deny any form of insider trading.
Nick Marsh there, and that's it from World Business Express.
I'm Leanna Byrne.
Thanks for listening.
