The world is staring down an energy crisis the likes of which it has never seen before. Since the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes against Iran on February 28, oil markets have gone haywire. Brent crude — the global benchmark — shot up from $73 a barrel the day before the conflict started, rocketed to nearly $120 at its worst, and now sits stubbornly above $98. Thursday brought another jolt, with a 9% single-day surge pushing it past $101 before a partial pullback.

The man behind the latest spike is Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran's freshly installed supreme leader. In his very first public statement since taking the role, he left no room for doubt: the "lever of blocking the Strait of Hormuz," he said, should absolutely still be used against Iran's enemies. For global energy markets, those words were like gasoline on an already raging fire.

The Strait of Hormuz is not just any waterway. Roughly a fifth of the world's entire oil supply — along with enormous quantities of liquefied natural gas — moves through this narrow stretch of water every single day. With the strait effectively shut down due to the threat of ship attacks, refineries in surrounding countries that produce jet fuel and diesel are also feeling the squeeze. Three more cargo vessels were struck on Thursday alone, bringing the total number of ships attacked during the war to eighteen.

The International Energy Agency tried to calm things down on Wednesday, announcing that all 32 of its member countries had agreed to a record-breaking release of 400 million barrels from strategic reserves. For a brief moment, prices dipped. Then Iran struck ships again, Khamenei spoke, and the market shot straight back up. Bill Farren-Price, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, put it bluntly on the BBC: the IEA's move is "a sticking plaster on a much bigger problem." With roughly 20 million barrels a day being knocked out of the Gulf supply, even 400 million barrels buys only a matter of weeks.

Europe has not escaped the damage either. London's FTSE 100 slid nearly 0.5%, while Germany's DAX, France's CAC and Spain's IBEX all dropped. Japan's Nikkei closed down 1%. The fear running through every trading floor is the same: if this disruption drags on for months — which the IEA is openly warning could happen — then higher energy prices will feed directly into inflation, forcing central banks that were planning to cut rates to instead hold firm or even hike.