The truce collapse lands first on the Strait of Hormuz insurance desks, not the White House podium. Three tankers hit, Qatari and Saudi flagged, and the US Central Command response arrived within the same news cycle across multiple Iranian cities rather than a single reprisal target. That ratio is the instrument that matters here, or, more precisely, it is the ratio the reinsurers in London and the Gulf are already repricing against, because a war-risk premium keyed to a single-ship, single-target world does not hold once Washington's response function is disproportionate by design.

The PBOC's own read on this runs through Wuhan, not Hormuz. US special forces sighted under civilian designation in a mainland city is not an isolated data point against Beijing's Pacific submarine missile test this week, it is confirmation to the People's Liberation Army's planning staff that Washington now prices simultaneous multi-theater posture as the baseline assumption, which is precisely the assumption Premier Li's economic working group has to absorb when it calibrates how much monetary and fiscal slack Beijing keeps in reserve against a Taiwan contingency that no longer arrives alone. Taipei's July 8 warning that Beijing's incremental pressure risks manufacturing a new status quo reads, from the PBOC's open-market desk, as a signal that reserve buffers built for a single-theater shock now have to stretch across three. The open-market desk's own liquidity calendar, built around the mid-month fixing, is the instrument that shows whether that stretch has already been priced.