Oil’s surge is now a gas-price problem, an airline problem, a bond-market problem, and after Friday’s jobs miss, a Fed headache for markets
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The market has spent the week remembering that geopolitics is a lot less abstract when it starts showing up on highway signs. Gas prices have logged their sharpest weekly jump since March 2022, crude has ripped higher as the Strait of Hormuz stays choked amid war in the Middle East, airline stocks have been getting kneecapped by rising fuel costs, and Friday’s weak jobs report turned an oil scare into something nastier: a full-blown stagflation scare with opening-bell receipts.
By Friday’s opening bell, the Dow was down 2.1% for the week — on pace for its worst weekly performance since October — and then opened another 320 points lower after the February jobs report showed the U.S. economy unexpectedly lost 92,000 jobs. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq $NDAQ opened down 0.9% and 1.44%, respectively, days after the S&P 500 gave back all of its 2026 gains.
The market came in worrying about inflation and found a growth scare waiting at the door.
Oil is doing most of the talking. On Friday, Brent crude hit $90 a barrel for the first time since April 2024 and was up 24% for the week, while West Texas Intermediate had surged nearly 30% to $87.46 — the biggest weekly jumps since the first spring of the COVID-19 2020 pandemic.
The reason is as simple as it is geopolitically messy: The Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries about a fifth of the world’s oil supply, has been effectively shut for seven days since the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran prompted a spiraling war in the Middle East. That has left about 140 million barrels stranded and unable to reach any sort of market.
That move made the trip from the futures curve to the gas station in a hurry. AAA said Thursday that the national average for regular gasoline had jumped nearly 27 cents in a week to $3.25 a gallon, the sharpest weekly move since March 2022. By Friday, the national average had reached about $3.32. President Donald Trump’s public response was to tell Reuters, “if they rise, they rise,” even as White House officials were scrambling for options to keep the sticker shock from becoming a political event of its own.
The stock market damage has been specific, which helps explain why the Dow looks sicker than the Nasdaq. On Thursday alone, the Dow fell 784.67 points, or 1.61%. Industrials, materials, and healthcare each dropped more than 2%, the passenger-airlines group tumbled 5.4%, and Southwest lost 6.9%. Financials — including JPMorgan $JPM and Goldman Sachs $GS — also weighed on the blue-chip index.
Then came the Fed problem. Before Friday’s jobs report, traders had cut the odds of a June rate cut to 35% as oil reignited inflation fears. After the payroll miss, those odds snapped back to about 49%. And the 10-year Treasury yield fell two basis points Friday after the weak jobs report, to about 4.125% (but was still on track for a 16-basis-point weekly increase, its biggest weekly move since April 2025). That’s the whole week in one ugly equation: pricier energy, weaker hiring, and a central bank that suddenly has more than one fire to watch.
Wall Street can treat war like background noise as much as it wants... right up until it starts showing up in the boring stuff. This week, it showed up in gas prices, airline stocks, and the 10-year yield. So: in the consumer’s wallet, the market’s risk appetite, and the bond market’s patience. Welcome to war, indeed — now available in the Dow and eventually in everything that rides on diesel.
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