The world is on edge watching the Middle East this week following Iran’s surprising missile attacks on Israel, and Israel’s vow to respond.
On Oct. 1, Iran fired more than 180 ballistic missiles into Israel in retaliation for Israel’s late-September killing of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia and political organization in Lebanon. Millions of Israelis were forced to seek safety in bomb shelters, but most of the incoming missiles were intercepted. Those that landed did not cause significant damage.
From a humanitarian standpoint, the ongoing, widening conflict—now also involving several strikes in densely populated areas of Lebanon—following a year of devastating loss of life in Gaza and the Oct. 7 terror attacks, is dire and alarming. But from an economic perspective, the escalation doesn’t represent a crisis—yet.
Johan Gott, cofounder of Prism, a consulting company specializing in political risk, says Iran’s stunning attack demonstrated that Tehran doesn’t have the capacity to damage the parts of Israel’s infrastructure and industry that are connected to the global economy, such as its semiconductor sector. “We have removed that worry on a large scale,” he tells Fortune. “At least thus far.”
The real threat to global economic stability remains the possibility that, with Iran drawn deeper into the conflict, Tehran could target oil infrastructure and trading routes in the Persian Gulf, through which roughly 25% of global oil shipments travel. “A closure there would be unprecedented,” says Gott. “There would be immediate, massive implications.”
“Thus far, oil prices have been kept in check, despite the high risk of conflict in the Middle East, a bit of a historical anomaly,” Prism also writes in a new report. “But Israeli strikes on Iranian oil production or Iranian disruption of oil exports of the Persian Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, UAE, etc.) would change that immediately. We could see a doubling or tripling of oil prices.”
Oil prices have modestly increased this week. Brent crude, which was trading at $71 a barrel before Iran’s attack, hit $76 on Oct. 2 and stood at $75 at the time of writing.
To complicate matters, an oil supply crunch could coincide with a surge in demand, given rate cuts in the U.S. and China’s new efforts to use stimulus to kick-start its weak economy. Those stimulus efforts are starting to pay off, with Chinese equity markets “spiking,” says George Coe, cofounder of Prism. In recent years, China’s faltering demand has kept commodity prices lower. So among many intersecting concerns related to a potential oil supply disruption, “you could have a demand spike and a supply problem at the same time,” Coe explains, which in turn could lead to higher prices and shortages.
What CEOs should be paying attention to
Still, say the pair, short of such a scenario, their advice to U.S. CEOs is to keep an eye on threats closer to home. The dockworker strike at U.S. ports and the potential for it to cause supply-chain chaos, which could also reintroduce inflation, should loom large with business leaders. The potential impacts of the strike have been underreported, they say.
But the duo’s larger concern is the U.S. election and protectionist trade policies floated by former President Donald Trump. The Republican nominee has promised to implement universal import tariffs if he wins in November and steeper tariffs on already taxed Chinese goods. Most mainstream economists say his policies would have enormous consequences for American families, but also global companies, including some of the largest U.S. multinational businesses, as Fortune’s Geoff Colvin reports. (Democratic nominee Kamala Harris supports “targeted and strategic” tariffs, a spokesperson told Colvin.)
Companies are still responding to the trade war Trump kicked off with China in his first term by reorienting their cost structures and supply chains, says Coe, and Trump’s latest proposals are far more extreme. “Some calculations indicate half a trillion worth of increased cost per year for U.S. imports—a number that then needs to be doubled to account for all but certain U.S. trade partner retaliation,” the duo write in their new report. “This would be a much bigger shock to global supply chains than the China trade war in Trump’s first term.“
During his first term, companies didn’t proactively respond to Trump’s tariff proposals, believing they were too outlandish, Gott adds. Despite all the noise about people eating pets and other bizarre claims, he continues, Trump has been consistent with his policies on trade, and he successfully executed on them in his first term. Four years later, if Trump wins, Gott says, discounting his trade proposals again would be “a huge mistake.”
