The peace holds into a second day. The backlog will take weeks.

A day on from the memorandum taking effect, the US–Iran peace is holding, and the clearest verdict is in the oil price. Brent has settled below $80 a barrel, and Goldman Sachs has cut its forecast — to $80 for the final quarter of this year, from $90, and to $75 for the 2027 average. The market, which repriced the war on the way up, is now repricing the peace on the way down.

The water is slower than the screen. Industry executives warn it will take weeks to clear the backlog of ships that built up over nearly four months — the first ten to fifteen days may even produce a visible spike in traffic as the queue empties, before throughput settles back toward something normal. More than 150 vessels were holding outside the strait at the start of the month. War-risk insurance, which had priced much of the fleet out, comes down slowly and on its own schedule. The deal grants free passage for at least sixty days; the physical normalisation runs on a separate, longer clock.

For the British household this is the same lag we have tracked all week, now seen from the other side. Pump prices have been easing — petrol came down again in the week to 15 June — but they fall like a feather where they rose like a stone, and they remain well above where they sat a year ago. The relief is real and it is slow. The better news sits further out: if the calm holds, the wholesale gas price that drives the winter energy bill has room to keep falling. The caution is that "if the calm holds" has been the entire story since February.

Britain spent four months as a price-taker in a war it did not fight, on a waterway it does not control. It will spend the recovery the same way — watching a backlog clear eight time zones away, waiting for the number on the forecourt to catch up. Agency, here, has meant being the last to feel both the shock and the relief.