The guns are quiet, the tankers are moving, and the bill is still landing on your gas bill

The most important thing that did not happen this week is a war restarting. The US–Iran arrangement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz has held for several days now; tanker traffic through the strait has risen, and Saudi crude is crossing it again. That is real, it is good news, and it deserves to be said plainly before the qualifications.

Now the qualifications. A strait is not a switch. Re-routing the world's tankers and clearing a backlog takes weeks, not a morning - the flow is rising, not restored. And the arrangement itself is young. This desk has flagged from the outset that a deal to reopen a sea lane is not the same as a settled peace, and the coming month will test which of the two this turns out to be.

Here is why a waterway thousands of miles away sits on your own doorstep. The blockade drove oil and gas prices up, and those prices fed straight into the energy costs that the Bank of England, on Thursday, named as the single reason it expects UK inflation to climb back above 3% later this year - and the reason it held rates rather than cutting. The peace has pulled some of that spike out again. But the lag between a barrel of oil and a household gas bill is months, not days, and a standing charge never falls as fast as it rose. The cost of the crisis is still working its way through your direct debit.

There is a harder lesson in the arithmetic. A relatively small act - closing one strait — moved the borrowing costs of the entire G7 and rewrote a central bank's inflation forecast. The leverage runs the wrong way for the rest of us: it costs very little to disrupt the system we all depend on, and a great deal to put it back together. That asymmetry is the real geopolitics of energy, and it does not disappear with this deal.

What I am watching: whether traffic keeps climbing or stalls, and whether the arrangement survives its second month. I will not tell you it is over. I will tell you it is holding - which is not the same thing.