Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
By: Peter Bouwhuis
I was standing in line at the grocery store yesterday, watching a mom put back a carton of eggs because the price had jumped again. She didn’t know about crack spreads or Strait of Hormuz blockades. She just knew her budget was shot. And honestly, that mom understands the global economy better than most politicians do.
Donald Trump wants to slash gasoline prices before the midterms. I get it. Everyone wants cheaper gas. But here’s the thing about poking Iran and reinstating blockades while simultaneously expecting fuel costs to drop: it doesn’t work that way.
Oil is hovering above $80 a barrel again. The tentative peace deal with Iran has effectively collapsed. Ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz are about to tumble back to 5 to 15 percent of prewar levels. And we’re surprised gas is still a dollar more expensive than before the war?
Come on.
The International Energy Agency says at least 10 percent of global refining capacity is offline. Ukraine keeps hitting Russian refineries with drones. China restricted exports. Gulf refineries are underperforming. So the “crack spread” goes to record highs, oil majors post juicy profits, and Trump fires off angry posts about price gouging.
Who’s really doing the gouging here?
Let me tell you what this looks like from where I’m sitting. The stock market tells one story while regular people live another. Investors celebrate refining profits while the mom at the grocery store puts back eggs. Airlines and shipping lines pass on the costs because of course they do, that’s what they do. But consumers? We’re the ones at the end of that pipeline, and we are exhausted.
When consumers buy less, logistics companies make less. When logistics companies make less, corporate revenues drop. When corporate revenues drop, people lose jobs. This isn’t complicated economics. It’s just common sense.
We’re all being treated like poker chips in a game played by people who have never worried about a grocery bill. The rich get their information early, position themselves accordingly, and the rest of us get to absorb the chaos.
So here’s my question to the politicians and the oil executives and the military strategists: What’s your endgame here? Because I can tell you ours. We just want to afford the basics. We want to fill our tanks without wincing. We want to live in a world where international power plays don’t show up in our weekly shopping totals.
That doesn’t seem like too much to ask. But apparently, in this ridiculous game of global poker, the little people don’t get to set the stakes. We just get to pay the bill.
And we are getting tired of it.
