Stocks started the week in negative territory as high gas prices and recent warnings from tech leaders about artificial intelligence spooked investors. Matt Phillips, markets correspondent for Axios, joins CBS News with analysis.
Page F2From§Eachthe supper edition — 14 September 2026
Saudi pipeline drone strike lifts oil past $105 before the Crown Prince asks Washington for military muscle.
As it ran on the front
The filing this week starts at a gas pump, not a battlefield. On the Friday before Labor Day, AAA clocked the national average at $4.14 a gallon, a holiday record, with diesel logging its own all-time high the same day. That was Labor Day weekend. By the following Friday, Saudi Arabia's energy ministry had closed the East-West Pipeline — the line built specifically to move crude around the Strait of Hormuz — calling it a precaution after Houthi forces struck it and Red Sea shipping lanes both. Precaution was the word in the release; the pipeline stayed down.
Monday it stayed down again, along with the rest of the market. New strikes hit Saudi infrastructure and ships, and Brent crude settled at $105.66 a barrel, up more than 4 percent on the day, with the line now projected out for weeks, not days. U.S. stocks opened the week lower, the oil column on the ticker doing most of the work, warnings out of the tech sector doing the rest.…
…(cont) Somewhere inside that same window — the New York Times dates it simply "last week," which puts it before Monday's settlement price was even final — Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met with a U.S. commander and asked Washington for more military help. The request came after the Houthi offensive began and before the pipeline's repair timeline, or the barrel price, had fully cleared. The ask, in other words, predates its own invoice.
Run the two filings side by side and the sequence reconciles cleanly. The infrastructure damage produces a higher price for every barrel Saudi Arabia still manages to ship. The same damage produces a request that the United States supply the defense for the infrastructure producing that price. One column is revenue. The other is a line item somebody else's budget covers. Nothing in the record shows the Kingdom offering to true up the difference.
The gas station on the corner doesn't get a filing. It gets a new number on the sign, sourced to a pipeline eight thousand miles away, running through a week where the owner of that pipeline asked another country's taxpayers to guard it. The barrel count and the balance sheet agree on that much, hon.
“They blow up their own pipeline problem, jack the price at your pump to a holiday record, and then ask Washington to send troops to protect the very thing that just made them richer. You're paying for it twice — once at the register, once when the bill for "military help" lands on a budget you also fund. That's not a coincidence, that's a business model with a flag on it.”
“Look, the Kingdom faces a real security threat — the Houthis hit a working pipeline, that's regional instability, not a stunt. Asking for U.S. military cooperation after an attack is standard alliance business, it's not like the Crown Prince timed a drone strike to a barrel price. Okay, the sequence on paper looks bad, but correlation isn't an invoice. Did I say invoice? Forget I said that.”
The receipts
New satellite photos show extensive damage to the East-West Pipeline, which was hit last week in a drone strike.
Oil prices on Monday leaped more than 4 percent after Yemen-based militant Houthis struck Saudi Arabia's infrastructure and ships, leaving one crucial pipeline out of service for weeks. The global benchmark for crude oil, Brent crude, settled at $105.66 per barrel as of Monday afternoon. West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the benchmark in…
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman asked the United States for more U.S. military help last week after the Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen launched a broad offensive.
· Saudi Arabia shutters key pipeline bypassing Strait of Hormuz following Houthi offensive from the morgue, 11 Sep 2026
· Gas prices reach Labor Day high amid Iran war from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
· Saudi Oil Exports Face New Threat After Attacks on Pipeline and Red Sea Shipping from the morgue, 11 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.