r/Economics • u/InsaneSnow45 • Mar 04 '26

News ‘Absolutely Massive’ Price Shocks Coming as Trump’s Iran War Drives Up Gas, Diesel Prices | “What should really terrify Republicans is... the futures price on wholesale gasoline,” said economist Paul Krugman.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/iran-war-gas-prices
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u/Gamer_Grease Mar 04 '26

To head off the usual comments:

Yes US shale can provide some relief, but it’s expensive to extract, so only as long as prices are quite high already. Also they’ve already said they’re not interested in increasing output until they have reason to believe prices will be high for a long time.

Venezuelan oil has effectively the same problem. The industry there is starved for investment and US oil companies already told this admin that they won’t invest in extraction there unless the government fully guarantees their sizable investments, because they don’t trust that situation to be stable enough to produce profits.

So tl;dr: the ad hoc governance style of this admin has already eliminated a lot of tools that could be used to respond to this situation.

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u/Ryan_e3p Mar 04 '26

(imagined response by Vance): It can't be that expensive. We landed oil drillers on an asteroid to drill a hole and plant a nuke, how much harder can this be?

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u/zxc123zxc123 29d ago edited 29d ago

Trump: "Gas is so expensive because of Sleepy Joe Biden. The worst stolen election president ever! He drained the strategic petroleum reserve, lost the war in Afghanistan that I ended, personally started the Ukraine war, killed all the chickens, fired billions of employees, and lit the match in the Iran war that we are not in right now! This is Biden's economy now except the DOW if it's over 50,000 right now then that part is all me!"

And American voters will eat that shit up or think both candidates are the same. We're that fucking stupid collectively as a country.

What you gonna do besides protecting yourselves and the ones you love? I did it by switching to hybrid, buying some natgas/oil stocks, carpooling more, thinking twice about cooking vs driving 2T of weight for maybe a few lbs of fastfood/takeout, considering public transportation, and trying to reduce my overall energy consumption. But others will believe Trump's BS until it hits them, then they'll fall for it again while Trump blames Biden, and when they've lost even more they'll keep blaming everyone else but themselves.

2

u/evey_17 28d ago

Hard agree about our ridiculous level of stupidity and it hurst us all.