Iran on Sunday threatened a "more painful" response to U.S. strikes on three Iranian oil tankers.
Page A6From§Eachthe early evening edition — 6 September 2026
Energy Secretary calls rising oil prices 'painful' as Iran vows a 'more painful' response.
As it ran on the front
Energy Secretary Chris Wright wants you to know the numbers are fine. At the podium he keeps two figures in rotation: Strait of Hormuz transit is "averaging over 9 million barrels a day," and yes, prices are up, but that's just "painful." Not a crisis. Not a supply shock. Painful — like a shot, like a workout, like something that's supposed to feel this way before it gets better.
Here's what "painful" looked like on Sunday. Brent crude, the benchmark the whole world prices against, rose about 1 percent as trading resumed. The national average for a gallon of gas sat near $4.15. That's the vital sign Wright is calling stable. That's stability, technically — no, it isn't. One percent in a single day of trading is not a market holding steady. It's a market that just watched something happen and hasn't decided how scared to be yet.…
…(cont) What it watched happen: on that same Sunday, the U.S. struck three Iranian oil tankers. Iran did not respond with a diplomatic note. It responded with a promise — a "more painful" reply, in its own words, aimed at a country whose Energy Secretary has spent this news cycle insisting "painful" is the ceiling, not the floor. The barrels-per-day figure Wright leads with describes a strait that a threat like that runs straight through.
So which number moves if the ninth million barrels doesn't clear the strait — the eighth? The seventh? That count doesn't exist in anything the Secretary has said, and it's a harder question than barrels-a-day, because it's the one that turns into a price at the pump before it turns into a headline.
That's the position: transit is fine, prices are painful, and the country that just got hit is promising something worse than painful. That's the whole position — wait, that's not what I was told to say out loud. The real position is that the Secretary has a number for how much oil is moving and no number for how much of it stops moving if Iran means what it said. One is a shipping report. The other is a hostage negotiation with a barrel count attached, and that press release doesn't exist yet.
“"Painful" is doing the job that word does at the pump — it means somebody's making money off your fill-up and calling it your problem to feel. The Secretary's got a barrels-a-day number for oil that hasn't stopped moving yet; he doesn't have a number for what happens the day it does, and Iran just promised "more painful" is next. One side of that sentence pays at the pump, and it isn't him.”
“Look, the flow numbers are solid — 9 million barrels a day, that's not nothing, that's a strait doing its job. And "painful" — painful is honest, painful is the administration leveling with you about — wait, did I just call a 1 percent overnight price jump "honest"? That's not — that's not the line. The line is the strait is open. It's open. Ask me about the tankers we hit and I'll get back to you.”
The receipts
Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, was up about 1 percent as trading resumed on Sunday, while the national average price of gas was nearly $4.15 a gallon.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.