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- [00:04]
Amy Archer
The telegraph.
- [00:09]
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Amy Archer
A new season of 90 Day is upon us and Little Miss Recap has you covered. My name is Amy Archer. I'm a writer, I'm a Libra, I'm a mom mom. And most importantly, I'm a lady of a certain age. I grew up on a steady diet of soap operas and I've now taken that lens and applied it to reality television. Together with a bunch of my friends, we talk about some of our favorite reality shows, including sister wives, 90 day, fiance, love is Blind, and more. And don't forget Reality Roundup on Fridays where we talk about the latest happening on and off screen of our favorite trash reality shows. Come and join us at Little Miss Recap. That's Little Miss Recap. Listen anywhere you get Podcasts
- [01:36]
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- [01:48]
Hans van Leeuwen
If you're anyone else and you haven't struck a bilateral deal between your government and Tehran, your ships flagged to you or heading to your ports are going to be charged $150,000 to go.
- [01:59]
Donald Trump
A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran.
- [02:06]
Instacart Announcer
Today, President Trump says Iran's supreme leader,
- [02:09]
Hans van Leeuwen
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in the attacks. The Pentagon is weighing a takeover of
- [02:19]
Roland Oliphant
that island as a way to force
- [02:21]
Hans van Leeuwen
the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran begged for this ceasefire and we all know it.
- [02:28]
Roland Oliphant
Does anyone really think that someone, anyone
- [02:30]
Hans van Leeuwen
can tell President Trump what to do? Come on.
- [02:35]
Roland Oliphant
I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Iran. The Latest It's Thursday 21st May, 2026, 83 days since the war began, 43 days since the rather shaky ceasefire was declared. On today's show, we'll be speaking to Telegraph's Hans van Leeuwen about the ongoing global economic shock. But first, a quick look at where we're at today. At least. When I was putting together this script this morning, oil prices were tumbling and global stock markets Were rat rallying after. Donald Trump said the war in Iran was in its final stages and some oil shipments began to move again through the Strait of Hormuz. We'll be talking more about that with Hans shortly. In an address to the United States Coast Guard, Donald Trump also claimed Iran wants to make a deal so badly.
- [03:21]
Donald Trump
We will not let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That's all. It's very simple. We will not let that happen. And we have great support. You wouldn't know that by reading the fake news, but we, we have great support. People don't want them to have a nuclear weapon, and they will not have a nuclear weapon. And they want to make a deal so badly. We'll see what happens. But we will. We hit them very hard, but we may have to hit them even harder. But maybe not. But we're not going to let Iran have a nuclear weapon and blow up the entire Middle East. Israel, the entire Middle east, and then come here for you. Not going to happen.
- [03:56]
Roland Oliphant
He paid tribute to the Coast Guard's contribution to Operation Epic Fury as well. But perhaps of more significance was what he had to say about Benjamin Netanyahu. When Donald Trump was asked whether the Israelis might go along with a potential U. S. Iran peace deal, here's what he had to say.
- [04:14]
Donald Trump
He'll do whatever I want him to do. He's a very, very good man. He'll do whatever I want him to do. And he said, he's a great guy. To me, he's a great guy. Don't forget he was a wartime prime minister and he's not treated right in Israel. In my opinion, I'm right now at 99% in Israel. I could run for prime minister. So maybe after I do this, I'll go to Israel, run for prime minister. At a poll this morning, I'm 99%, so that's good.
- [04:45]
Roland Oliphant
Now, he was speaking shortly after he spoke to Mr. Netanyahu over the phone. That call, we're told, was about whether or not to restart strikes on Iran. And the context of this, of course, as you'll know if you listen to yesterday's podcast, is that there is believed to be a gap between the US Position and the Israeli one on whether to continue the war. The Israelis very much hoping to return to kinetic action to push ahead with the war. And the Americans, on the other hand, leaning towards a diplomatic solution designed to end Iran's nuclear ambitions. Israeli report said the two leaders clashed in the overnight phone call. And in his remarks to reporters, Mr. Trump said he was in no hurry to reach an agreement with Iran. However, he said it's the final stages of negotiations and we will see what happens. We're going to do some things that are a little bit nasty, but hopefully that won't happen. All this going on while Pakistan's Field Marshal Azmin Munir, the chief shuttle diplomat at the moment, is expected in Tehran. He's meant to be on his way there today as we speak. He may be there by the time you listen to this podcast. Iran has said that it is responding to a text sent by the US exactly what is in the text of that document the Americans have submitted, we don't know, but signs that diplomacy is ongoing. However, at the same time, shortly before I began recording, Iran's Supreme Leader was reported to have issued a directive saying that the country's near nuclear weapons grade uranium should not be sent abroad. This is two senior Iranian sources speaking to Reuters. They said, quote, the Supreme Leader's directive and the consensus within the establishment is that the stockpile of enriched uranium should not leave the country. The sources said that Iran's top officials believe sending the material abroad would leave the country more vulnerable. Future attacks by the United States and Israel. However, the source said there were feasible formulas to resolve the matter. There are solutions, like diluting the stockpile under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Iranian sources said. A reminder, the IAEA estimates that Iran has 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60%. Well, that's what they had when Israel and America began attacking their facilities on June 2025. How much of that has survived is unclear. But the Israelis have been very clear. They've said that they will not consider the war over until the enriched uranium has been removed from Iran. Therefore, yet another big barrier, big gap between the two sides as negotiations continue. One other remark from those two senior Iranian sources speaking to Reuters. They said there was deep suspicion in Iran that the pause in hostilities was merely a tactical deception by Washington to create a sense of before it renews airstrikes. You remember speaking to Jonathan Hackett yesterday. That was very much his analysis. He felt that peace talks were essentially a ruse. Is he right? Will there be a return to war? We will see. Moving on to the economics before we bring in Hans and Brent crude, that's the global oil benchmark did indeed fall more than 5% to around $104 a barrel on Wednesday. And that came after two supertankers carrying Iraqi oil, not Iranian. Iraqi oil from Iraq to China successfully passed through the Strait of H? Muz. A positive sign you would think. However, Sultan Al Jabba, who is the CEO of Adnoc, the UAE's oil giant, told the Atlantic Council event on Wednesday that even if the conflict ends tomorrow, these are his words. Even if this conflict ends tomorrow, it will take at least four months to get back to 80% of pre conflict flows. Full flows will not return before the first or even second quarter of 2027. An extremely pessimistic remark there. A couple more things. Iran has also announced that it is assuming full control over the entire Strait of Hormuz, including Omani and Emirati waters. The UAE has called this a pipe dream. This is another Emirati official the regime is trying to establish a new reality born from a clear military defeat, but attempts to control the Strait of Hormuz or infringe the UAE's maritime sovereignty and nothing but pipe dreams. Anger there. And in a small bit of, I suppose, positive maritime news, 20 Iranian sailors who are on board a vessel seized by the US off Singapore have returned home following some back and forth diplomacy between the Iranians, the Pakistanis and the Singaporeans. That is the news. After the break. More on the ongoing global economic meltdown.
- [09:28]
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- [10:35]
Roland Oliphant
Welcome back. You're listening to Iran the Latest with me, Roland Oliphant. I was speaking in the first half of the show about good news and bad news coming out of the Straight of Hormuz. I'm very pleased to say we have in the studio, the Telegraph's own Hans van Leeuwen, our international economics editor, the man who knows about money on this planet. Hans, welcome back to Iran. The latest. You've been writing some really interesting piece, actually, about how what's happening in Hormuza, which we were just talking about there, is affecting shipping globally.
- [11:06]
Hans van Leeuwen
That's right. I mean, you know, obviously we spend a lot of time on the business desk looking at the impacts on oil flows and gas and fertilizer and helium and so on. And we heard you talking about Sultan Al Jaber saying that, you know, that won't get back to normal until the first half of next year. But this piece was more looking even broader than that at whether, you know, whether things will ever get back to normal in the global shipping trade. Because Iran's ability to control the Strait of Hormuz, which it has now demonstrated for the best part of two months and to potentially charge tolls and to turn the Strait on and off at will, has sort of changed the game in shipping. And people are looking all around the world and going where, you know, there are choke points like this all over the place. Hormuz is a particularly kind of awkward one. But you know what happens in the Strait of Malacca, you know what happens even in the Strait of Gibraltar, the Bering Strait, the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, there's all these places where maritime trade gets funneled into a little channel, and suddenly the rules of the game have sort of shifted under everyone's feet. And that's kind of what the piece was looking at.
- [12:04]
Roland Oliphant
You talk in particular about the Panama Canal.
- [12:06]
Hans van Leeuwen
Yeah, well, the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal are a bit different because they're kind of created infrastructure. Toll charging is a legitimate part of using those canals. The piece starts with the Panama Canal just for a slightly different reason, which is that the oil trade is kind of adapting and people are sending tankers that they can't get into Hormuz to America or, you know, or to wherever there's a source of crude oil or lng, liquefied natural gas. And one of the sort of flow on effects of this is that the Panama Canal, which is a busy sort of place at the best of times, has become sort of, you know, has queues of tankers at both sides waiting to get through as people sort of create a new trade route through there. The flow and effect of that is that although a lot of tankers kind of, you know, reserves their slots in advance on the Panama Canal, you can also sort of buy them in A kind of spot market at auction. And the prices of buying a berth to get through the Panama Canal for your tanker have sort of doubled or tripled or even quadrupled in the last month or two. The sort of situation in the Panama Canal, you know, if things get back to normal in Hormuz, and that's a big if, the Panama Canal may kind of ease off a bit. But it's interestingly, in the Panama Canal, there's been a kind of slightly more longer term sort of fight for control of it between the US and China, who's going to kind of manage the infrastructure. Infrastructure and basically have the final say over what happens in that waterway. And that kind of goes back to this bigger picture, which is that the idea that these choke points, these kind of crucial waterways in the global trade supply chain are now sort of up for grabs and countries need to exert their control over them. And the way they're thought about that, you know, under the law of the sea, these are supposed to be places through which ships have free passage. But what Iran has done is to potentially normalise or create a sort of break that kind of principle or norm and create this other system. So it's. In the last couple of days, Reuters has talked to Iranian officials and they've actually sort of spelled out what their kind of tolling regime is. Now they have a sort of three tiers. If you're a strategic partner like Russia or China, you know, you've got. Your ships will be allowed to go through. If you've got close ties with Iran, India or Pakistan, your ships will be, you know, be allowed to go through once you've sorted out a sort of deal with it with the Tehran regime to kind of ensure passage. If you're anyone else and you haven't struck a bilateral deal between your government and Tehran, your ships flagged to you or heading to your ports are going to be charged $150,000 to go through. And if you're an aggressor or an enemy of Tehran, you know, the blockade may continue to apply to you regardless. You won't even be eligible to. To pay a toll. Now, whether this is the final system, you know, or whether this is the official policy, it's hard to say, but kind of report. And that the reason I mention it is it kind of demonstrates this idea that, you know, what was a free, a free waterway has now become something that Iran is. Has control over and there's very little that anyone else can do about it at this point. And it's Already prompted some sort of. It just prompts all these sort of flow on effects. An Indonesian finance minister popped up and he said, you know what, you know, this tolling idea, we're right next to the Strait of Malacca. God, it'd be great if we could toll, you know, we'd make a fortune. He was slapped down by his government, but the fact that he said it sort of just made everything. Oh, my goodness, you know, the dam is broken, the genie's out of the bottle. You know, this idea of tolling on waterways and basically incredibly increasing the cost of shipping and the risk of shipping and therefore the cost of everything that goes on a ship when it comes into our supermarket shelf. That's all in play now. And even Donald Trump himself, earlier on, sometime in April, he sort of mused, he said, oh, wouldn't it be great if the US and Iran could toll this thing together? You know, I wouldn't mind getting a piece of the action. When he was in China, he and Xi Jinping said in a statement, you know, we resolutely oppose TOL on, you know, on, on international waterways. But with Donald Trump, who can say, it's really interesting.
- [15:52]
Roland Oliphant
Do we know you described there the system that the Iranians are putting in place. I read out in the, in the news section of the podcast a kind of the outraged Emirati reaction to this. I'm wondering how much of this you think is trolling and how much you think of this is. Is really, is really operational. I say trolling because, I mean, they've even got on Twitter and they've created a sorry X as it is now. They've created an account for what they're calling the Strait of Hormuz authority or something new account saying, you know, you're going to have to talk to us if you want to get through. And they've released a map with these lines going straight across the strait that goes from the Iranian coast to Gaea and from the Iranian coast to uae,
- [16:31]
Hans van Leeuwen
on the other hand.
- [16:31]
Roland Oliphant
So that's all ours. No kind of chat with the Emiratis or the Omanis, who also have territorial waters there. How much of this is just kind of aggressive posturing?
- [16:41]
Hans van Leeuwen
There is certainly an aggressive posturing element to it. And, you know, I guess you maximalise now so that if, you know, if you can reach a deal with the region and, or with the U.S. you know, you'll look like a good guy if you just wind it back to being a toll through your bit of the waters or something. The tiering system that was described in the Reuters report is sort of consistent with what we've seen over the last few days, which is vessels bound for China and for India and Pakistan, I think, being allowed to get through. And also a South Korean tanker as well. Presumably they've come to some kind of agreement now, at least for that ship anyway. So the sort of trickle of vessels we're seeing, the destinations or the flags on those vessels are consistent with the idea that there's a tiering system like this. There's a lot of vessels still stuck in there. And of course, you know, some of that movement in the oil prices, like not is partly responding to Trump, but also partly like, oh, we're starting to see ships go through. Maybe, maybe things are easing up. But let's remember that if we're seeing three or four ships a day, well before the strait was closed in early March, we were seeing 140 ships a day. So we're a million miles away from seeing enough ships go through there.
- [17:45]
Roland Oliphant
That fee they mentioned, what's that?
- [17:46]
Hans van Leeuwen
100, $150,000.
- [17:49]
Roland Oliphant
$150,000. That's quite a cut from the 2 million they were first talking about. It sounds a lot. I mean, how does that compare to the market rate? I mean, how does it compare to the Panama Canal or Suez? Or is this an outrageous ask?
- [18:02]
Hans van Leeuwen
Yes, I mean, it's an outrageous asking, the sense that it contravenes the law of the sea. The Panama Canal spot price is normally about $140,000. At the moment, 385,000 plus. So it's in that ballpar. Yes. It's hard to know how much trust we should put in that number out of Iran and how this thing is working and how this money is being collected. So it's probably not an absolutely devastating cost of shipping, but it all just adds up, doesn't it? And again, if the principle is established that Iran can do this, if this isn't sort of turned back, then, you know, all bets are off across the world. It may be that this means that, you know, Hormuz will never get back to being the water way it was. So, for example, you know, the Houthis started firing on container vessels just around the corner from there. Babel Mandeb Strait, which is in the Red Sea, which. Just around the corner. Yeah, Which. Yeah, which he used to sort of get up to the Suez Canal. You go that way and, you know, ships were being attacked and a lot of ships said, you know, what if we're coming from Asia and we're going to the Mediterranean, we're going to go all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, around the bottom of Africa, the traffic through the Suez Canal and past that sort of choke point there. The Bab el Mandam Strait has never recovered from those Houthi attacks. It's never gone back to what it was. There's some talk that if everything is resolved and there's a massive great peace deal across the region, you know, maybe that will start to come back again. But the ships are still going the long way around, still paying all that extra cost in fuel and time and, you know, staff, et cetera, to avoid the risk. And in Hormuz, what you're already seeing, what you saw last week, was the United Arab Emirates saying, right, we've got a port on the other side of our country, which, you know, which if ships dock there, they don't have to come through Hormuz. So we're going to double our pipeline capacity from, you know, the oil refinery that's sort of inside the Persian Gulf, so that we can just pipe oil, buy land over to this other port and sort of. Yeah, yeah. And that's the other thing. If maritime choke points are weaponised on a regular basis, or the threat is there of weaponisation, people are going to start to develop these workarounds, pipelines, land bridges, as they're called, where you dump, get it off the boat, put it on trucks and, you know, drive it across land to somewhere else. These things are much, much more expensive than, you know, just sailing through a lovely strait like Horwuz or Malacca. The idea that we're going to switch to pipelines and land bridges is, again, just going to add a massive cost
- [20:19]
Roland Oliphant
to the massive cost on everything. The other thing with Fujairah, of course, is that the Iranians have drawn their boundary of where the Strait of Hormuz. So that Fujairah is inside the Strait of Hormuz.
- [20:30]
Hans van Leeuwen
Yeah.
- [20:31]
Roland Oliphant
So they're saying anything that comes out of Fujairah, which is, of course, on the. On the Indian Ocean side of the strait, they're saying, no, no, that still counts, which is very outrageous, isn't it?
- [20:44]
Hans van Leeuwen
Yeah. Also, in this particular case, I'm not really sure if what kind of an insurance policy it is, because it's a more aggressive military act, perhaps, but it's easier to use a drone to blow up a fixed pipeline or hit some port infrastructure even, than it is to kind of set fire to a tanker. So it doesn't really get you, by you, the level of security against a kind of hostile Iran. If you're the UAE that you know that perhaps you'd hope.
- [21:11]
Roland Oliphant
I don't know if you've been following this, but I want to move on to what this all means for everybody and costs and things. And we're all kind of worried about this. We keep on saying that the global economic shock is going to hit us next month. I'm not sure if you still believe that or not. Petrol prices are up, but not catastrophically in at least in this part of southeast England.
- [21:33]
Hans van Leeuwen
Yes, it is a funny thing, isn't it? Like we keep hearing, oh, it's just around the corner. It's just around the corner. It's just around the corner. And I've even spoken to some economists who are like, well, who aren't oil market people and who are like, is it really just around the corner or is the market actually going to kind of, you know, rewire itself, re pipe itself, you know, reroute itself? And are we going to avoid the worst through the great ingenuity of the marketplace and capitalism to kind of find solutions and stitch things together? The counter argument to that, that is that is the one coming out of fairly regularly out of the International Energy Agency and the boss, Fatih Birol, who just keeps saying, we're living off the stockpiles. You know, most countries have a strategic reserve or stockpile or inventory of oil that they've, you know, been saving for just such an emergency as this. We're drawing down on them very fast and that's what is keeping us going. That's why the petrol pump prices aren't catastrophically high. That's kind of why the Brent crude price is, you know, is 100, $104, not $150, $160. And those, you know, by definition, those stockpiles can't last forever. And it's when those stockpiles get to a critical level and you can't run them down to zero either, as I understand it, because you need to actually have something in the tank to kind of, you know, make the tank sort of functional or something like this. So, you know, you can't dry them out completely. At some point, and they say it is in the. It is like June, July. At some point, the stockpile isn't something we can rely on anymore. At some point. Point, the amount of rerouting we can do to avoid the Hormuz problem, we've done it all. And that's when we kind of look around and we're going, where the hell Are we going to get the. The rest of the oil we need from. We can't. We there just. It physically isn't possible to replace the Hormuz supply entirely from other sources, and it is impossible to kind of make the stockpiles last forever. So there must be a crunch coming. And this is possibly why, you know, there's been a bit more, I don't know, urgency about Donald Trump in the last couple of days compared to the last couple of weeks, because we may be coming closer and closer to that point.
- [23:32]
Roland Oliphant
There was a story yesterday that the UK had eased some sanctions on Russian oil, apparently in response to this. On the surface, that looks like pretty outrageous thing for a country that positions itself as Ukraine's greatest ally to be doing. Is that really what happened and does that reflect the gravity of the situation?
- [23:53]
Hans van Leeuwen
Again, my understanding is that they haven't eased a sanction so much as not gone to the next level of sanction. And so this is the really strange thing about this, you know, that we were talking about on the Telegraph business desk, is we can't see that this is going to deliver a particularly large amount of oil into the British system that will make a material difference at the petrol pump. So trashing your geopolitical credibility for such a small reward is the thing that we couldn't understand and that, frankly, the government didn't really explain very well yesterday. So it's a bit of a puzzling one. One I'm not sure it's up there in the top five smartest things to do to kind of deal with an energy crisis, let's put it that way.
- [24:33]
Roland Oliphant
Okay. So, I mean, from what I understand, the UK government has softened new sanctions, so the new package they're bringing in is softer than was expected, rather than they're watering down old ones that exist. Includes waivers on sanctions blocking purchases of jet fuel and diesel refined from Russian crude oil in third countries. So that's the.
- [24:51]
Hans van Leeuwen
Yes. So the idea is that we would be able to buy oil from, say, India refined, as you say, jet fuel or diesel that were made with Russian crude. But again, India's got to get that Russian crude, which isn't always straightforward. And, and then it's got to come to us just the timeframe over which this might be be a sort of useful solution. And the scale of it as a kind of contribution to Britain's potential shortfall in its oil or refined or petroleum supplies is just. I think it's quite questionable.
- [25:21]
Roland Oliphant
How useful would that be to Russia? Is there a figure we can put on how much extra money Russia will get as a result of this in
- [25:27]
Hans van Leeuwen
terms of what they might be able to generate from selling it to the uk, I wouldn't have thought very much. I mean, Russia's biggest problem, of course, is still that it's quite difficult for them to get as much oil out of their refineries and through their ports as they'd like because Ukraine is carrying out an extremely effective program of disruption through drone strikes and so on. That's their method of keeping a break on Russia's ability to profit from these kind of sanctions waivers. But I think even so, it's fair to say that, that the U.S. and UK sanctions moves this week have gone down like a bucket of cold sick in Kiev, that's for sure.
- [26:04]
Roland Oliphant
What an image.
- [26:07]
Hans van Leeuwen
I think the other thing about Sultan Al Jaber from Abu Dhabi is probably right, that, you know, if, if Trump does strike a deal and chances are it'll be a piece of paper, as it often is, you know, like a fool's cap page with, with 12 points on it, that then needs to be thrashed out into something that works and that then needs to actually work in practice and, you know, then has to draw in some of the other gu, like Oman and Iran probably have to negotiate over whatever it is they agree to do or not do in Hormuz. And then you've got to restart the refineries and the gas facilities and then you've got to kind of get all the tankers in there, not just the ones that are stuck there, but you've got to wherever the tankers are now, they're all over the world picking up oil from somewhere else. They've got to come all the way back into the Gulf. And that's what's going to mean. It's going to have quite a long tail. And then you've also got the problem that the fertiliser shortage, as I understand it, is likely to impact farmers more in the next growing season than it is in this one. They've already got the fertiliser they need. Now it's a question of whether they can get fertilizer that they'll need in, you know, in the autumn or in the, in the southern hemisphere, that'll be the spring. And so, you know, a sort of fertiliser led kind of food shortage or, you know, commodity price increase type thing is something we can look forward to in the back half of this year or the first half of next year as well. So for a short war, it's casting a long Shadow.
- [27:24]
Roland Oliphant
And one particular Shadow. Thank you so much for this. But just before you leave us, I was wondering if we could talk about India. We've mentioned before how it's really Asia that's really felt the impact of this more than anybody else. Countries across Asia. Prime Minister Modi has been in really kind of in firefighting mode, I think, this week.
- [27:45]
Hans van Leeuwen
Yes, he's actually in Europe as we speak, sort of looking for energy deals and investment deals to get him through his immediate problem. I mean, it's an extraordinary moment for him because only a few weeks ago I wrote a feature about this which has perhaps sort of riled up the sort of prickly patriots of the Indian, of our Indian readership. But he'd won an election in a part of India West Bengal, which has 100 million people in it, which has been long been a stronghold of the opposition parties. He now controls 21 out of India's 28 states, or his party does, I should say. And so he was on this political high and then suddenly the impacts of the Iran war are really starting to sort of cascade through the Indian economy. They are very, very dep on imported oil and gas. And so they've been desperately sort of, you know, throwing money and excise tax cuts at the petrol prices to keep them down. But pressures are starting to mount up in there. There's going to be inflation, there are going to be higher petrol prices, industries having to shut down factories a bit. A lot of money's moving out of the country at the moment, foreign investors and portfolio money out of the stock market, which is kind of putting a lot of downward pressure on the Indian currency, the rupee. So it's not like India's going to, you know, the general expectation is they'll still grow at about 6% this, and that'd be a great problem to have, frankly, if you were the uk. But it's not the kind of growth that they want or need to kind of keep them on the sort of trajectory that India has the path. It wants to become a developed economy, to kind of, you know, challenge China as a major world economic power and geopolitical power. They need to be growing at 8% a year and 6% is just not going to cut the mustard, particularly if it's, you know, if there's, if there are all these problems simmering inside, like current account deficits and inflation and, you know, sort of handbrake on investment there. So, yeah, it is, it is a sort of tricky time for them. They're not in full blown crisis, but they're at the forefront, as, as are many countries in Asia, of the fallout from the Iran conflict.
- [29:41]
Roland Oliphant
It's interesting, there's some reporting about, I've seen about the. About all the kind of sacrifices he's asking ordinary Indian citizens to make. Things like, please stop, lay off buying gold, buy an awful lot of gold compared to other people on the planet.
- [29:56]
Hans van Leeuwen
And that's partly because they get all the gold from overseas as well. And so they buy it in such vast quantities that it affects the kind of balance of payments. And with foreign investment money that's going out as well, you sort of don't really want a trade deficit and a kind of capital outflow at the same time. That's when you start to get a lot of mismatches in your economic situation. And so he sort of said, can you all hold off buying gold for a bit? And if you are going to buy it, I'm going to put a massive tariff on it, just to kind of try and stop all this money flowing out of the country and keep it within the Indian boundary. Like everywhere else in Asia, there's this like, work from home, drive less, use public transport, please don't go on expensive jet fuel guzzling overseas holidays.
- [30:34]
Roland Oliphant
He wants people to lay off destination weddings.
- [30:36]
Hans van Leeuwen
Yeah, I mean, these are things we haven't yet experienced in the uk. I mean, you know, again, the doomsayers would say this is all coming our way. You know, like what we see in Asia now in Thailand, in the Philippines, in Indonesia, in India, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh. That's all coming to Europe eventually. I think we've had enough warning. The message you're getting out of the kind of, particularly out of the aviation industry and to some extent out of the freight industry is, you know, so we're not seeing vast shortfalls of jet fuel and diesel of that sort of scale yet. We've got the wherewithal to kind of basically buy the supplies at a higher price that would otherwise go to these poorer countries. So we're kind of buying our way out of trouble there a bit, I think, which means the crisis is being born in the places that are probably the least able to kind of weather it. But that's another reason why we're not seeing that yet. Whether we will, I guess, depends on, know, the old question of how long and when and under what circumstances all this gets. All this gets sorted out and isn't it.
- [31:37]
Roland Oliphant
It's amazing, isn't it? It does feel like an old question now. It's been going for nearly three months now.
- [31:42]
Hans van Leeuwen
Yeah, it's not a Venezuela style. All done in two days. Although another interesting sort of element of this is that there's a, there's some US Naval assets moving towards Cuba at the moment and he's hoping to, you know, open another front, you know, even before this one's done. So we'll see.
- [31:56]
Roland Oliphant
I'll stop you there because I think we were planning to talk about Cuba on tomorrow's podcast.
- [32:01]
Hans van Leeuwen
I look forward to it.
- [32:02]
Roland Oliphant
I think, look forward to hearing it. Hans Van Leeuwen, thank you so much for joining us on Iran the Latest that is all for today's episode. I will be back tomorrow, as I said, hopefully talking about whatever is happening in Cuba. Until then, that was Iran the Latest. Goodbye.
- [32:21]
Donald Trump
Foreign.
- [32:28]
Roland Oliphant
The Latest is an original podcast from the Telegraph created by David Knowles and hosted by me, Roland Olyphant and Venetia Rainey. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following around the latest in your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review as it helps others find the show. For more from our foreign correspondents on the ground, sign up to our new daily newsletter Cables via our website website or listen to our sister podcast Ukraine the Latest. We are still on the same email address battle lineselegraph.co.uk or you can contact us on X. You can find our handles in the show Notes the producer is Peter Shevlin. The executive producers are Venetia Rainey and Louisa Wells.
- [33:13]
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