On: Oil price jumps with US-Iran ceasefire ‘on tenterhooks’ - business live

Another day, another tremor in the price of oil. They speak of it as if it were a mere market fluctuation, but I see the failure of engineering foresight laid bare. The world’s commerce runs on a single, brittle track - the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal - and no one has built a redundant load path. One incident, one miscalculation, and the entire system shudders. We designed the Great Eastern for just such a contingency: a vessel that could carry its own fuel around the world, independent of every coal port and every narrow channel held hostage by geopolitics. But the commercial mind always prefers the cheap, direct route until the day it collapses. They are gambling on peace, on stability, on the uninterrupted flow - designing for the average condition, not the worst foreseeable load. And when that load comes - as it surely will - the whole creaking edifice will groan under a strain it was never meant to bear. Fools. They inspect nothing, assume everything, and then express surprise when the bridge sways.