How Fake News Could Send Oil Prices Soaring

Oil has been surging since the beginning of the Iran war, taking barrels off the market—but the market has no way of knowing, in real time, whether the next disruption it reacts to actually happened because energy prices don’t wait for confirmation.

They move on the first credible signal, and in a conflict where strikes, explosions, and conflicting reports are constant, a fabricated event doesn’t need to prove it’s real; it just needs to fit the pattern long enough to be priced.