The Iran conflict triggered the supply shock playbook. Markets ran through it quickly. Oil got priced. LNG got priced. Fertilizer followed, roughly a month after the ships stopped moving. Helium got its own deep dive. Every analyst with a Bloomberg terminal found their exposure.
Here’s the one that’s still invisible.
There’s an industry most investors have never thought about. It makes it legally possible for commercial aircraft to fly. Not mechanically possible. Legally possible. Under international aviation regulations, every commercial aircraft must adhere to a mandatory maintenance schedule... skip it, and the plane is grounded by law, not by physics. This industry is called MRO: Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul. It’s a $100-plus billion global business. It’s concentrated in the Gulf. And the Hormuz disruption has been quietly breaking it.
The second-order shock nobody’s talking about isn’t energy. It isn’t food. It’s the world’s wide-body aircraft fleet... and a rolling capacity crisis arriving nine to eighteen months from now.
