Insurance analysts who spoke with Yahoo Finance said major insurance companies are reworking policies as threats continue to build, making coverage conditional, imposing routing restrictions on contracts, requiring voyage approval, and refusing to give quotes for specific routes and situations.

As the conflict progressed, some of the world’s major insurance clubs started refusing to offer war risk coverage to any vessel with plans to cross the strait. The result is that owners are “choosing not to transit rather than accept terms that make voyage economics unworkable,” the insurance analysts said.

While the move by the White House represents a major intervention, the announcement “doesn’t fully ‘solve’ the war-risk,” Arsenio Longo, the founder of maritime intelligence platform HUAX, told Yahoo Finance. “The real question is whether that becomes executable cover at voyage speed.”

The market will look for three things, Longo said: how quickly these guarantees are available, what the policies actually look like, and whether escorts trigger escalatory attacks from the Iranian regime.

“Political risk” and “financial security guarantees” may not map directly to hull damage, crew deaths, or other potential threats, Longo told Yahoo Finance, and vessel owners will want clarity on what happens if their tanker is attacked. Escorts may coax some companies into sending their ships through the strait, but such an escort would “make every transit a high-visibility event, and potentially an escalation trigger.”

“Yes, this likely brings some capacity back, but until [Development Finance Corporation] terms are operationally clear and the first escorted transit happens without incident, serious operators will still ‘wait and watch,’” Longo said.

Even if the White House’s proposal is implemented quickly and comprehensively, other factors may negate much of its positive market effects.

The war’s duration and sustained higher prices for oil are the main market risk factors right now, regardless of the White House’s guarantees, said Horizon Investments chief investment officer Scott Ladner, adding that the “conflict has to end for this to be really over.”

For example, if the US were to put American soldiers on the ground in Iran, a strategist told Yahoo Finance, “that’s a whole different story” and could lead to a much deeper sell-off in US equity markets, warning that investors would likely take “more money out of the market, bring it to the sidelines.”

But the market liked the early symbol.

“Even if this is not a long-term solution,” Baird’s Mayfield noted, “it’s reassuring the markets that they [the administration] are paying attention to this sort of thing [and] thinking through these solutions.”

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Brooke DiPalma is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on X at @BrookeDiPalma or email her at bdipalma@yahoofinance.com.

Jake Conley is a breaking news reporter covering US equities for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @byjakeconley or email him at jake.conley@yahooinc.com.