Markets opened down nearly 1% across the indexes on Monday, but news-aggregating accounts online and on social media picked up a report by New York Post Pentagon reporter Caitlin Doornbos. At 7:46 a.m. Monday, Doornbos had posted on X that Iranian officials were still considering a U.S. proposal to end the war, “centering around uranium enrichment.”
“One thing affecting why Iran couldn’t make a deal while U.S. was in Islamabad … Iranians could not call their final decision-maker back in Tehran due to security risks,” she wrote, citing a “Pakistani analyst.”
Soon, the headline traveled. Brent crude began dropping steeply, down roughly 4% to about $4.50 a barrel, roundtripping hundreds of millions of dollars notionally across the front-month contract. Doornbos received hundreds of replies to her post, calling her a liar, a market-manipulator and a pawn of the Trump regime.
By 11 a.m., she issued another post—”she had a responsibility to clarify”—that her original post contained no news, at all. She was just reiterating what was known; that discussions were centered on the nuclear deal, which Vice President JD Vance had already said, and that theoretically Iranians could accept.
