The Houthis weren’t discussed at any length at this week’s ECB meeting, in case you were curious.

The bank left rates on hold Thursday, as widely expected, but resurgent crude prices raise the odds of a second hike from the Governing Council, which in June became the first G7 central bank to raise rates as a result of the war.

At the post-meeting press conference, Christine Lagarde expressed concern over fireworks in the Red Sea, where two Saudi-linked tankers sat ablaze after being struck by Houthi missiles. But the GC wasn’t prepared to raise rates solely on account of the group’s efforts to worsen the energy crunch on behalf of their benefactors in Tehran.

The situation in the Gulf, and in the Mideast more generally, is too fluid for policymakers to assess on the fly, Lagarde said, but indicated that recent developments cast considerable doubt on the plausibility of a benign outcome.

“Abrupt changes occurring in a matter of days, not just in terms of the level of the conflict, but also the consequences in terms of energy prices” mean the mild scenario pondered by ECB staff appears “quite unlikely,” she sighed.

Headline inflation receded to 2.8% in Europe last month from 3.2% prior, and core price growth to 2.4% from 2.6%, but many worry the reprieve will prove fleeting given the resumption of what might as well be all-out war between the US and Iran. The Houthis’ entry into the conflict is another upside risk to energy prices.

The figure above gives you a lay of the land, so to speak.

The ECB was proactive in hiking last month, and with the caveat that the wait between the bank’s July gathering and its September meeting always feels more like two years than two months, traders will continue to anticipate a hike barring a sustained cessation of hostilities in the Gulf.

“The outlook for energy prices, while highly volatile, currently stands close to the baseline of the June staff projections and well above the levels recorded prior to the conflict,” the new statement read. “Uncertainty remains high and the full inflationary impact of the energy shock has yet to play out.”

Although the bank’s not providing forward guidance, the statement explicitly mentioned “indirect and second-round effects” from higher energy prices, a reference traders will read as hawkish.

The prepared remarks for the press conference contained the obligatory caveat that “second-round effects [could prove] less pronounced than anticipated [while] more volatile and risk-averse financial markets could weigh on demand and thereby lower inflation as well.”

I won’t spend any additional time on the ECB today, given readers generally aren’t interested in the bank’s policy deliberations. Suffice to say the collapse of the US-Iran ceasefire was an unwelcome development for the GC.