Jammu, April 24 -- Oil's refusal to break decisively towards $100 a barrel, despite a tense geopolitical backdrop and repeated threats tied to the Strait of Hormuz, says something important about how markets are reading the balance between rhetoric and reality. At one level, the price action looks counterintuitive. A blockade or even a serious disruption in Hormuz would ordinarily be expected to trigger a violent risk premium, given the waterway's central role in global crude flows. Yet crude lingering in the mid-80s suggests traders are not fully pricing in a near-term catastrophe. That does not mean markets are relaxed. It means they are making a more granular judgment: the political temperature is high, the messaging from Washington ha...