Oil Hovers Near Six-month High with Nuclear Talks and US Tariffs in Focushttps://english.aawsat.com/business/5243898-oil-hovers-near-six-month-high-nuclear-talks-and-us-tariffs-focus
Oil Hovers Near Six-month High with Nuclear Talks and US Tariffs in Focus
Oil platforms and pumpjacks at Lake Maracaibo, in Cabimas, Venezuela, January 26, 2026. REUTERS/Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/File Photo
Oil prices steadied near a six-month high on Monday as the US and Iran prepared for a third round of nuclear talks while increased economic uncertainty was also in focus after the latest US tariff upheaval.
Brent crude futures were up 9 cents at $71.85 a barrel by 1308 GMT while US West Texas Intermediate crude gained 15 cents to $66.63, Reuters reported.
Growing concern over potential military conflict between the US and Iran pushed Brent prices up more than 5% last week to their highest since July 2025 at $72.34.
"With the next, and possibly last, round of the Iranian nuclear talks not until Thursday, focus is on the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down import tariffs and the subsequent reaction from the government," said PVM Oil Associates analyst Tamas Varga.
The US Customs and Border Protection agency said it would halt collections of tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act at 12:01 a.m. EST (0501 GMT) on Tuesday.
However, Trump said on Saturday that he would raise a temporary tariff from 10% to 15% on US imports from all countries, the maximum allowed under the law, after the US Supreme Court struck down his previous tariff program.
"This morning’s weakness is a defensive move, and needless to say, with the uncertainty surrounding a US military intervention in Iran, the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war and now the US Supreme Court’s decision, oil price direction is not (clear), but volatility is guaranteed," PVM's Varga said.
Iran has indicated it is prepared to make concessions on its nuclear program in return for the lifting of sanctions and recognition of its right to enrich uranium, a senior Iranian official told Reuters ahead of Thursday's third round of nuclear talks between the two nations.
While prices on paper had moved higher, softer prompt spreads and weaker physical differentials pointed to pricing being based on geopolitical concerns rather than an actual lack of oil in the market, Morgan Stanley analysts said in a note.
Iran’s Monthslong Internet Shutdown Is Crushing Businesses in an Already Battered Economyhttps://english.aawsat.com/business/5268448-iran%E2%80%99s-monthslong-internet-shutdown-crushing-businesses-already-battered-economy
A man uses his smartphone while riding the subway in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2024. (AP)
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Iran’s Monthslong Internet Shutdown Is Crushing Businesses in an Already Battered Economy
A man uses his smartphone while riding the subway in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2024. (AP)
At her studio in Iran's capital, Amen Khademi prepared a fashion shoot for a jacket she designed with Persian-inspired motifs. But even as she applied lipstick to the model, she was distracted, worrying if her business would survive after four months without its main link to customers — the internet.
Iran's 90 million people have been cut off from the internet for most of 2026, one of the world's longest and strictest national shutdowns. That is devastating an online economy that had long defied government restrictions and international sanctions. From fashion to fitness, to advertising and retailers, many have seen their incomes evaporate.
Khademi hasn't made a sale in months. “The internet outage in the past four months has completely destroyed not only my business, but many online businesses," she said.
Despite an uneasy truce with the US and Israel, Iran’s rulers have refused to reverse the shutdown they have depicted as a wartime necessity. But they are facing an outcry as it adds to mass job losses from strikes on key industries and an ongoing US blockade.
Before January, Iranians could access the internet, but authorities blocked a large amount of content. Now all access to the global web has been shut down. Some workarounds exist, but they have become enormously expensive, out of reach for most Iranians.
The internet cutoff costs the economy an estimated $30-40 million daily, with indirect losses likely twice that much, a member of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, Afshin Kolahi, told a local newspaper. About 10 million people have jobs that depend on internet connectivity, according to the communications minister, Sattar Hashemi.
An unprecedented shutdown guts an online economy
Throughout years of economic turmoil in Iran brought on by sanctions and mismanagement, platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp helped small businesses to find customers, and people to earn extra income to afford skyrocketing prices for basic goods.
Iranian authorities first shut down the internet in January during mass anti-government protests. That cutoff was just starting to ease when the government imposed a complete internet blackout on Feb. 28 as the US and Israel launched the war.
Mahsa Alimardani, an expert on internet censorship, said Kashmir and Myanmar have had longer blocks affecting specific regions or platforms. Countries like China, with its “Great Firewall,” and North Korea, have always strictly limited access to the global internet.
Fashion designer Amen Khademi works on her laptop with model Farnaz Ojaghloo, left, at her studio in Tehran, Iran, Thursday, April 23, 2026. (AP)
“What makes Iran’s shutdown unprecedented is the combination of scale and severity: an entire country of 90 million people with a developed digital economy deliberately reverted to a controlled national intranet,” said Alimardani, an associate director for technology threats and opportunities at the rights group Witness.
A flagship company of Iran’s digital economy, online retailer DigiKala, recently said it was laying off 200 people, about 3% of its workforce. The pain extends to “production, foreign trade and even traditional business,” Reza Olfatnasab, head of a national group representing digital businesses, said in comments published in Iranian media.
Khademi's shopfront is Instagram. But her studio’s page — with more than 30,000 followers — is now inactive. She was doing the photo shoot to save the pictures for later, hoping to find an alternative.
Her model, Farnaz Ojaghloo, is also a fitness coach. The shutdown has dried up both her modeling gigs and the online courses she ran for people inside Iran and abroad.
“Psychologically, it really hits hard,” Ojaghloo said. “All the plans you had for six months or a year ahead get pushed aside, and your only concern becomes surviving in the moment.”
The alternatives are ‘terrible’
For years, authorities in Iran have enforced filters and policed content on platforms like YouTube and Instagram. But before the war, Iranians could bypass restrictions with cheap virtual private networks, known as VPNs, and other easy workarounds.
Now, the shutdown has stoked high prices for black-market VPNs. Iranian state media routinely report arrests of people for using illegal VPNs or the American satellite system Starlink, which was banned last year.
Senior government officials are awarded “white” SIM cards granting them access to the global internet. Under pressure to alleviate the economic harm, the government is now allowing less-restricted internet access to a small number of professions, business and media.
An e-commerce trade group in Tehran condemned the tiered system in Iranian media on Wednesday, calling it “an abuse of an obvious need of every citizen.” It said the outage threatens “the destruction of the country’s infrastructure at the hands of our own decision-makers.”
The vast majority of people have no choice but Iran’s national net.
Two women use a smartphone in northern Tehran, Iran, Sept. 28, 2025. (AP)
A Tehran resident who works in advertising said sponsors have little interest in paying for content that can’t be posted on major platforms like Instagram, where he has tens of thousands of followers. He said his income is down to near zero since the war began.
A gamer in Isfahan — also with a large following on YouTube and Instagram — said Iran’s domestic net “is terrible” — slow, insecure and full of bugs. He too has lost almost all his income from sponsors and donations.
Iran has its own social media platforms modeled on services like WhatsApp and YouTube, but content is closely monitored and often censored.
“Nobody really wants to use these platforms, but there is no other option,” the gamer said. Both he and the advertising worker spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns.
A growing number of street vendors
The shutdown has piled new pressures on Iran’s once large and educated middle class, already struggling in the face of a prewar currency crash.
Economic decline in Iran has spurred waves of anti-government protests, most recently in December. Now, more Iranians are thinking of emigrating, a software developer said.
The developer — likewise speaking on condition of anonymity out of safety fears — said the internet shutdown has wiped out remote work. He lost his own job when his former company laid off almost all its employees in recent weeks, he said.
The consequences are visible in the rising numbers of street peddlers in Tehran. Reza Amiri, a 32-year-old former employee of an internet provider, now sells hats and umbrellas by a metro stop. He lost his job after the war started and has not received his last month’s salary, he said.
Monireh Pishgahi sells ornaments and accessories on the capital’s famed Vali Asr Street. She said her tailoring business used to supply three online shops. As business dried up, she shut down and laid off her five employees.
One downtown shopkeeper, Mohammad Rihai, said he had given up on trying to persuade street vendors to stop blocking the sidewalk outside his store. “After the war, you see them all along the sidewalk. I cannot fight them anymore.”
EU-Mercosur Trade Deal Takes Provisional Effect, Boosting Hopes for Millionshttps://english.aawsat.com/business/5268446-eu-mercosur-trade-deal-takes-provisional-effect-boosting-hopes-millions
Brazil's Vice President Geraldo Alckmin during a meeting with foreign media at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, April 22, 2026. REUTERS/Jorge Silva
EU-Mercosur Trade Deal Takes Provisional Effect, Boosting Hopes for Millions
Brazil's Vice President Geraldo Alckmin during a meeting with foreign media at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, April 22, 2026. REUTERS/Jorge Silva
The long-awaited trade deal between South American bloc Mercosur and the European Union took effect Friday, at least provisionally. The initiative creates a trans-Atlantic market estimated at $22 trillion with 720 million potential consumers, and some nations expect to boost their exports by more than 10% by 2038, once it is fully implemented.
The trade deal was signed Jan. 17 at a meeting of the South American group. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's move to provisionally enact the deal, effectively sidestepping the EU Parliament, is being challenged by EU lawmakers at the bloc’s judiciary. The agreement will be halted if the European body rules against it.
“This is good news for EU businesses of all sizes, good news for our consumers and good news for our farmers, who will gain valuable new export opportunities, with full protection for sensitive sectors,” she said Thursday.
Von der Leyen is expected to hold a videoconference Friday with leaders of Mercosur nations Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay to celebrate the agreement.
Earlier this week, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, one of the key supporters of the agreement, signed a decree validating the deal in his country. He said it is a response to unilateral tariffs imposed last year by US President Donald Trump and a reaffirmation of multilateralism.
“Nothing better than believing in the exercise of democracy, in multilateralism, and in cordial relations between nations,” Lula said in a ceremony in the capital, Brasilia, to celebrate the milestone after more than 25 years of negotiations.
Last week, Brazil's vice president and one of the negotiators of the deal, Geraldo Alckmin, said in an interview with The Associated Press and other news agencies that not striking the deal with the EU would have meant staying behind while competitor nations made other agreements.
Brazil is by far Mercosur’s largest economy, with a gross domestic product estimated at over $2.3 trillion in 2025.
Lia Valls, an associate researcher at the think-tank Fundacao Getulio Vargas based in Rio de Janeiro, agrees that the deal offers better perspectives against unilateralism worldwide.
“The EU and Mercosur are showing that it is possible for big blocs to reach a deal in this world where that multilateral system is being very weakened and where the US clearly operates to do that,” Valls told the AP. “It is a very positive sign.”
The agreement faced opposition from European farmers and environmental groups and was delayed in December, before being referred to the EU’s top court.
South American agribusiness industries, chiefly beef, fruit and minerals, are expecting a boost in exports to Europe. European automakers, pharmaceutical companies and technology firms also look forward to making new inroads in Mercosur markets.
While companies based in Mercosur countries have expressed fear of tough competition from European peers in hi-tech industries, European farmers have shown concerns about price pressures and imports that do not follow similar environmental standards.
French President Emmanuel Macron, one of the critics of the deal, has long demanded safeguards to monitor and stop large economic disruption in the EU, increased regulations in the Mercosur nations like pesticide restrictions, and more inspections of imports at EU ports.
The agreement gradually removes trade barriers and tariffs in the two blocs, but it also keeps economic safeguard clauses for European countries to protect some sectors from excessive competition, such as poultry, beef, sugar, and fruit.
Oil Prices Rise with No Sign of End to Iran Warhttps://english.aawsat.com/business/5268423-oil-prices-rise-no-sign-end-iran-war
FILE - An oil vessel is visible in the Caribbean Sea at sunset during a nearby conference aimed at transitioning away from fossil fuels Tuesday, April 28, 2026, in Santa Marta, Colombia. (AP Photo/Ivan Valencia, File)
FILE - An oil vessel is visible in the Caribbean Sea at sunset during a nearby conference aimed at transitioning away from fossil fuels Tuesday, April 28, 2026, in Santa Marta, Colombia. (AP Photo/Ivan Valencia, File)
Oil rose on Friday as efforts to resolve the Iran war remained at an impasse, with Tehran still blocking the Strait of Hormuz and the US Navy blocking exports of Iranian crude.
Brent crude futures for July were up $1.04, or 0.94%, to $111.44 per barrel by 0421 GMT, while West Texas Intermediate futures had risen 41 cents, or 0.39%, to $105.48 per barrel, Reuters reported.
Both benchmarks have posted gains across four straight months, with Brent's June contract, which expired on Thursday, hitting $126.41 a barrel, the highest since March 2022.
Oil prices have been on the rise since the end of February when the US and Israel attacked Iran, resulting in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the disruption of shipments of around one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supply. Brent gained 50% in March alone.
A ceasefire has been in place since April 8, but on Thursday evening, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said it was not reasonable to expect quick results from US talks, according to the official IRNA news agency.
"Expecting to reach a result in a short time, regardless of who the mediator is, in my opinion, is not very realistic," he was quoted as saying.
Earlier in the day, a senior official of Iran's Revolutionary Guards had threatened "long and painful strikes" on US positions if Washington renewed attacks on Iran, pushing oil prices to intraday peaks before retreating.
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