$580 million in suspicious oil futures traded minutes before Trump’s Iran reversal

Roughly $580 million worth of oil futures changed hands in a single minute early Monday morning, only about 15 minutes before President Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. had been engaged in “productive conversations” with Iran to end the war.

Now Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is calling what he sees: treason.

“We have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit,” Krugman wrote in a Substack post Tuesday. “That word is treason.”

Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, denied that any negotiations with Washington had taken place, calling the claim “fakenews” used to “manipulate the financial and oil markets.” Stocks pulled back slightly and energy prices stymied their free-fall on his statement, but ultimately traders seemed to trust that Trump was telling the truth about winding down the war.