Your four factors explain the lag better than anything I have read, and the point about futures prices not being transacted prices is the one I keep coming back to.
There may be a fifth factor sitting inside the first. During those months the strait was not only constricted, it was priced. The Revolutionary Guard has run a registration and transit fee regime since mid-March, around two million dollars for a loaded VLCC, with access tiered by flag. That adds a commercial layer on top of the physical one, and the two move through a market differently. Some of the volume never stopped. It changed cost basis instead.
If that is right, then part of what looks like absorbed shock is shock that has been repriced rather than avoided, and it would show up later and elsewhere. Does that fit your model of where the recession lands?
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