How US sanctions on Iran ripple through global markets and consumers
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x whatsapp-stroke copylink google Add Al Jazeera on Google info US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent outlined the new sanctions on Monday [Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters] By Andy Hirschfeld Published On 24 Aug 2026 24 Aug 2026 The administration of United States President Donald Trump has announced new economic sanctions on Tehran, describing the measures as an “economic D-Day” as the US war on Iran approaches the six-month mark.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the sanctions on Monday, alongside a naval blockade of Iranian ports.
Bessent said the sanctions target key sources of Iran’s revenue, including its oil and gas industry, and called on countries around the world to cut economic ties with Tehran.
The Treasury Department said the sanctions will target Iran’s aviation, digital assets, gold, technology and shipping sectors, as well as impose sanctions on 60 specific individuals and vessels.
“The main point is that Iran seems to have much less room than it did in previous years to simply work around sanctions,” Peiman Salehi, a Tehran-based geopolitical analyst, told Al Jazeera.
Bessent also said on Monday that the new sanctions expose Tehran’s trade partners to secondary penalties. According to a Treasury Department release on Monday, the targets include ships based in or associated with countries including Singapore, China, and Hong Kong.
“Today’s sanctions are mostly incremental, but are part of trying to intimidate remaining trading partners into cutting ties [with Iran],” said Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank.
“There’s a lot of signalling and bluster aimed at getting other countries to crack down on entities involved in grey-zone trade, but new measures are mostly incremental for now,” she said. Grey-zone trade refers to both illegal, underground trade and trade that is unsanctioned but difficult.
The Treasury Department said Iran has used cryptocurrency to circumvent its longtime sanctions and facilitate transactions involving the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and members of the Iranian regime. The department also said Iran has used gold to help prop up the value of its currency amid economic instability.
The new shipping sanctions target Iran’s state-linked shipping fleet, which the Treasury Department alleges is being used to transport oil as well as “sensitive weapons components”.
The technology sanctions are intended to restrict Iran’s acquisition of materials that could be used in its weapons programmes. The aviation sanctions target Iranian airlines that the Treasury Department alleges are being used to transport weapons and military personnel, as well as financial resources to Iran’s proxies.
Washington also indefinitely suspended several broad exceptions to its ongoing sanctions on Iran, including those covering academic exchanges, personal money transfers and certain sporting activities. Organisations currently engaged in those activities have until September 8 to wind down their operations.
Ziemba says these measures “will have more effect on Iranians, not just the regime”.
Washington’s sanctions on Iran have been in place since 1979, after students took hostages at the US Embassy in Tehran, and increased over the next 45 years. Sanctions were briefly paused, however, after the administration of President Barack Obama and world powers signed a nuclear deal with Tehran in 2015. But the Trump administration withdrew from the deal during its first term, in 2018, bringing back old penalties while adding new ones.
Washington imposed new sanctions during Trump’s second term, many of them before the US and Israel first struck the country on February 28.
In February 2025, the Treasury Department sanctioned 30 individuals and vessels involved in the “brokering [of] the sale and transportation of Iranian petroleum-related products”, according to a department release. The targets were based in several countries, including India and China.
In December 2025, Washington sanctioned 29 vessels it accused of being part of a so-called shadow fleet used to transport Iranian petroleum. It also sanctioned Egyptian businessman Hatem Elsaid Farid Ibrahim Sakr over his businesses’ alleged ties to seven of those 29 vessels. The measures continued the 1979 sanctions campaign against Iran’s oil industry.
The Treasury Department stepped up the sanctions again in April 2026, targeting another two dozen individuals, companies and vessels operating within the network of Iranian oil shipping magnate Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani, the son of now-deceased senior Iranian security official Ali Shamkhani.
Later that same month, the Treasury also targeted what it described as “regime-linked cryptocurrency” and said it had seized nearly half a billion dollars from so-called “shadow banking networks”.
Pressure on the Iranian oil market, both through existing sanctions as well as the current war, has tightened the rest of the globe’s oil supply and affected countries that buy Iranian oil.
China, for example, is the primary destination for Iranian oil, buying roughly 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports. Beijing bought 1.4 million barrels per day…
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