The Open Bell — Ep. 036 — 11 Aug 2026

Today on The Open Bell: Iran's foreign minister just ruled out direct talks with Washington and renewed demands over the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that 20% of the world's oil supply passes through, and crude is already up 5% this week, which means this isn't a geopolitical footnote, it's heading straight for your petrol bill. Berkshire Hathaway posted a 16% jump in quarterly profits and then did something its famously cautious new CEO Greg Abel hadn't done before at this scale: spent big on buying back its own shares, and when a company sitting on one of the largest cash piles in American corporate history decides now is the time to spend it, that's a signal worth paying attention to. If today's episode was worth your commute, a five-star rating helps someone else find the show tomorrow. Hosted by Alex Monroe. New episodes every weekday morning at theopenbell.co Not investment advice. For informational purposes only. --- Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:16 Iran Rejects Hormuz Deal Terms, WTI Crude Surges 5% to $82 03:15 Berkshire Hathaway Surges 2.3% as Q2 Earnings Rise 16%, Buyb 05:49 Closing thoughts

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Good morning. It's Tuesday, 11 August 2026, and this is the Open Bell. I'm Alex Monroe. The deal that everyone spent last week hoping for is now further away than it's ever been. Here's what that means for your petrol bill, your mortgage, and everything in between. Oil is back in the wrong direction. A week ago, this show was covering a 5% plunge on Hormuz deal optimism. Then Iran's foreign minister ruled out direct talks with Washington on Sunday, then President Trump demanded Iran pay compensation before any deal gets done. And then Tehran replaced the official who had been issuing negotiating demands with a veteran Revolutionary Guards commander who has made his skepticism about any talks with the U.S. quite clear. Per Reuters, West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude price benchmark, settled at around $82 a barrel on Monday, up roughly 5% on the day. Brent crude, the global equivalent, climbed to around $85.5. That is about $8 a barrel, higher than where we were sitting last week, when deal optimism was at its peak. And here is why that number touches your life directly. Every $10 rise in crude typically adds around $25 a gallon to what you pay at the pump. So from last week's lows to Monday's close, you are looking at roughly 20 cents a gallon added to your next fill-up, and that is before any further escalation. The inflation consequence is the piece that doesn't get said loudly enough. Oil doesn't just cost you at the pump, it's embedded in the price of food, in the cost of shipping, in manufacturing inputs, in airline tickets. Sustained oil above $80 is not a petrol station story, it's a cost of living story, and the Federal Reserve is watching it that way. CME FedWatch, the market's real-time tracker of what traders expect the Fed to do with interest rates, now puts the probability of a September rate hike at around 52%. That's up from 44% just after Friday's weak jobs report. In other words, oil just partially reversed the rate cut hopes that the soft payrolls number bought markets two days ago. The counterargument worth hearing is that US and Canadian production has been rising fast enough that some analysts believe WTI can stay below $90 even with hormuz restricted. Strategic petroleum reserve releases remain a tool the administration could use, so the ceiling may hold, but the floor has clearly risen. The personnel change in Tehran is what I'd watch most closely. Swapping a negotiator for a revolutionary guards commander isn't a diplomatic signal. It's the opposite of one. The last time a comparable supply shock ran this long was the 1973 Arab oil embargo, and that one tipped the US into recession within a year. We're nowhere near that yet. But the direction of travel right now is the wrong one. Wednesday's July CPI, the monthly inflation reading, lands in less than 48 hours. If it comes in hot, alongside oil at $82, the Fed's calculation becomes considerably simpler, and not in a way that helps anyone with a variable rate mortgage. The Hormuz situation has now fully reversed a week's worth of optimism, added roughly 50 cents to what a September rate hike would mean for your borrowing costs, and reminded markets that in this conflict, every apparent breakthrough has eventually been walked back. There is, against all of that, one corner of the market that had a genuinely good Monday, Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate that owns everything from Geico Insurance to BNSF Railroad to a large chunk of the American energy grid, reported second quarter earnings before the market opened and its shares rose about 2.3% on the day, outperforming a flat broader market. The headline number was a 16% rise in operating earnings for the quarter led by the energy and railroad divisions, but the number the market actually reacted to was the cash figure. Berkshire's famous cash pile, the enormous reserve that Warren Buffett spent years accumulating, and that became a kind of running joke about how cautious he was getting, fell from around $397 billion at the start of the year to around $365 billion. That's a $30 billion drawdown in a single quarter. New CEO Greg Abel is deploying capital, buybacks, where a company repurchases its own shares, effectively returning money to shareholders, came in at $4.5 billion for the quarter, up from just $235 million in the first quarter of this year. Abel also made Berkshire a net buyer of other companies' stocks for the first time in 15 quarters, buying roughly $20 billion more in equities than it sold. He personally bought Berkshire shares too, putting around $15 million of his own money in. The last time Berkshire accelerated buybacks at a comparable pace was the third quarter of 2020, under Buffett, who bought back around $9 billion of stock. That preceded several years of the company outperforming the broader S P 500, the index of America's 500 largest companies, by a meaningful margin. The honest caveat is that $365 billion in cash is still an enormous number. Some value investors read this not as a structural shift, but as Abel still waiting for one genuinely large, disruptive opportunity. A deal so big that the remaining pile is the firepower. That reading isn't wrong, but it also doesn't account for the scale of the change in a single quarter. What Abel is signaling, at the very minimum, is that at current valuations, Berkshire's own shares and a selection of other equities look cheap enough to buy. When the steward of the largest private cash reserve in American corporate history starts writing checks at this pace, it tends to carry some information about what he thinks the economy looks like from the inside. Across insurance, freight, energy, and finance simultaneously. That's a more useful read on the U.S. economy than almost any single data point. So that is Tuesday the 11th. Oil has reversed a week of deal optimism. The Fed's September decision just got harder, and the inflation print on Wednesday is going to matter more than almost any number we've had this summer. Meanwhile, while Berkshire is quietly signaling that one of the best informed economic observers on the planet sees enough value to start spending. Those two facts don't cancel each other out. They just describe the same uncertain moment from different angles. The newsletter has today's numbers in writing, free, link in the show notes. That's the open bell. I'm Alex Monroe. Have a sharp morning.