The latest edition of Maplecroft’s Global Risk Forecast casts a spotlight on rising political tensions over the Straits of Hormuz, the narrow stretch of water between the Iran and the UAE through which 90 percent of the Gulf’s oil is exported.

In recent weeks, Iran has conducted naval exercises aimed at showing its purported ability to shut the strait at will and to close down around a fifth of the world’s oil trade.

As our Global Risk Forecast makes clear, Iran’s latest actions highlight ‘the degree to which the proposed EU oil embargo threatens an already weakened Iranian economy’. (more…)