I was at a school event earlier this month, one of those get-to-know-the-parents mornings that are awkward for the first twenty minutes and then surprisingly good. I live in Dubai and work across two time zones, so I try to be present for the things that matter: school drop-offs, the occasional class event.
The only other father who showed up was my son's best friend's father. What are the chances? We ended up talking for most of the morning.
He works in insurance. At one point he asked me if I knew why airfares had gone up so much in the last few months. I said it had to be fuel. He smiled. Fuel plays a role, he said, but it is not the biggest part.
Later that week I priced my December trip to New York, when I try to be there for the busiest weeks of the year. Last peak season the ticket cost me roughly 5,400 dirhams, about $1,500. This year it is around 7,000 dirhams, about $1,900. That is close to 30% more for the same seat.
What it actually costs to ship a diamond
It sent me straight back to a question I had been asking about my own shipping bill. In 2023 and 2024, a basic shipment from my New York office to a customer on the East Coast, with little or no declared value, cost me $30 to $33. Today the same shipment is at least $55 to $60. To the West Coast it is noticeably more. And it is not just me. Read the Jewelers Helping Jewelers group on Facebook and everyone is complaining about the same thing.
That is close to double. Over the same stretch, US consumer prices rose by under 10%. Fuel went up with the Iran war, but fuel alone does not get you to double.
And we cannot easily pass it on. Amazon has trained all of us to expect free shipping. Ask a customer to pay for it and it feels almost like an insult, a hit to the ego. I am the same: I will walk away from a purchase if I am asked to pay for shipping. But someone pays. In our trade, it is usually the wholesaler, either with the bill or with the sale.
So why the near-doubling? Part of the answer is the carriers themselves. FedEx's fuel surcharge has gone from 7.75% of the shipping rate in early 2021 to 30% this September. Nearly three-quarters of that rise came from the carriers rewriting their surcharge tables, not from the price at the pump. Add a base-rate increase every January and a stream of new fees, and 2026 is on track to be the most expensive year on record for parcel shipping.
My secure courier and customs broker tell the same story, one letter at a time.
One of those letters, in March this year, listed its reasons: rising airline charges, fuel, inflation, and higher insurance premiums.
So the war gave the carriers cover. But the bigger story, the one my new friend was really telling me, is insurance.
The Strait of Hormuz changed everything
Before the conflict in the Gulf, insuring a $100 million tanker to cross the Strait of Hormuz against war risk cost roughly $250,000. Today the same crossing costs between $3 million and $8 million, and at the peak it reached $10 million. That is not a rounding error. It is twelve to forty times the prewar rate, and in some cases the cover simply was not available. My new friend told me companies wired that kind of money within 24 hours. That is how urgent it was.
Insurance is not siloed. When underwriters take catastrophic losses in one corridor, or expect them, they reprice risk well beyond it. Marine, aviation and war cover moved first. That is in the price of your flight from London to Los Angeles, and in the price of the cargo flying with you. War hysteria, my friend called it, and he told me plainly that some people have made a fortune from it.
He was not exaggerating. Reinsurers, the companies that insure the insurers, made $25.2 billion of net income in 2025, up 23% on the year before.
What we know about jewelry theft
That made me ask why premiums are higher for us. Jewelers know how much theft there is in this trade. Insurers know more.
The Jewelers Security Alliance published its 2025 crime report in May. The number of crimes fell 13%, to 1,233. Losses still rose, to $144.7 million. The crimes are fewer, but they are bigger and more violent. Robberies involving guns, mace or vehicles went from 17% to 27%. Thirteen times last year, someone drove a vehicle into an occupied store. The year before, it did not happen once.
That is the loss history an insurer's pricing model runs on. Every time one writes a policy for a jeweler, it is pricing the chance of a six- or seven-figure loss. As that chance rises, so does the premium. That is not greed. That is arithmetic.
It also means there are parts of the United States that insurers are increasingly reluctant to cover at all. Economists have long argued that a weaker economy brings more crime, and I do not think this gets better. Ever.
The thread that connects all of it
A war in the Persian Gulf, a burglary crew in California, a smash-and-grab in Houston, a hurricane in Florida. From the insurer's chair, these are the same conversation. They are all inputs into the same pricing model.
Insurance is how the world's risk gets distributed. Climate, war, crime, inflation: all of it flows through premiums, into prices, into the cost of doing business for people who had nothing to do with any of it.
I ship diamonds. I do not move tankers through contested straits. But I am paying for the tankers, and I am paying for the smash-and-grabs. We all are.
I am not looking forward to the terms my insurers send in January. Not because I expect the worst, but because I now know what is in that number.
What this means for the trade
Shipping and insurance are a margin squeeze this industry complains about in private but rarely discusses in public. We talk about lab-grown, tariffs and consumer sentiment. We do not talk about the quiet doubling of the cost of getting a stone from our desk to our customer's door, or the premium that rises behind it.
Here is what it looks like on the ground. Recently we were trying to win a new customer with a very high-value diamond. A stone like that cannot go in a normal parcel; it has to travel by armored courier. We were not going to ask a new customer to pay for shipping. After all, we want to spoil him the way Amazon has spoiled us. The stone did not sell, and the round trip cost us $1,350. That is 1% of the value of the stone, no joke. In an industry that earns small margins, that one hurts.
Multiply that across a year of shipments. It changes what you quote. It changes whether a small order is worth taking. It changes the economics of the whole relationship with a retail client.
None of these costs arrives as one big number. They come as a surcharge here, a letter there, a renewal in January. The businesses that add them up and price them in will be fine. The ones that do not will absorb it, quietly, until they cannot.
Falak Shah is President of YF Diamonds. The Loupe is his view of the diamond and jewelry trade.
Sources (figures as of October 2026)
Parcel shipping costs and carrier fuel surcharges: FreightWaves ·
US inflation: Trading Economics ·
Hormuz war risk premiums: Insurance Business ·
Reinsurer earnings: Insurance Business ·
Jewelry crime in 2025: National Jeweler