OPEC says shipping and insurance costs now exceed a third of crude value

The striking part is structural rather than cyclical: when logistics and risk premiums outgrow the commodity they carry, the economics of crude trade itself start to bend, with producers absorbing thinner netbacks and consumers paying for the friction in between. This lands hardest on import-dependent economies and on the shipping and insurance desks that price geopolitical risk, since those costs are now a first-order variable rather than a rounding error. Whether this share keeps climbing — and whether it gets treated as a permanent feature of the supply chain or a temporary spike — is the open question worth watching.