Trump take paycheck
By 
They told me if I supported Kamala Harris that we would end up with higher prices and more wars, and they were right:
The chairman of oil producer DNO was flying from New York to Oslo early on Feb. 28 when he told staff to turn off the company’s oil wells in Iraq.
America and Israel had just attacked neighboring Iran. Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani wasn’t taking any chances, having weathered a drone strike on the company’s oil fields in Iraqi Kurdistan last summer. By the time he landed, the pumps had stopped—the first oil shutdown of the war.
To the south, another problem was brewing. An apparent recording of an Iranian naval captain telling ships not to enter the Strait of Hormuz spread through industry WhatsApp groups.
Tanker traffic slowed to a trickle. The doomsday some oil analysts believed could never happen was coming to pass. Unable to ship crude to world markets, much bigger producers in Iraq began to run out of places to put it. The country cut output by more than two-thirds. Tanks in Kuwait were next to fill up. U.S. oil prices vaulted above $100 a barrel Sunday for the first time since the fallout of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
“In the whole written history of the strait, it has never been closed, ever,” said JPMorgan Chase analyst Natasha Kaneva. “To me, it was not just the worst-case scenario. It was an unthinkable scenario.”
On Saturday, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. signaled it too was slowing production so tanks didn’t overflow. If the strait is still closed this Friday, daily output in the region could fall by more than four million barrels, Kaneva estimates. The decline could reach around nine million by the end of March, representing almost a 10th of global demand.
One week into President Trump’s war on Iran, the most severe shock to energy markets since the 1970s is cascading through the world economy. The disruption quickly fed into higher gasoline and diesel prices at the pump, and higher mortgage rates and borrowing costs for the U.S. government, endangering Trump’s economic priorities.
Worried about food prices? This won’t help:
But the impact will still reverberate, especially in Europe and Asia. For decades, the U.S. military and its allies have spent billions of dollars ensuring the Strait of Hormuz stays open. Just 21 miles across at its narrowest stretch, and flanked to the northeast by a sworn enemy of the West, the channel between Oman and Iran is a superhighway for about a fifth of global supplies of oil and liquefied natural gas.
Massive amounts of fertilizer sail through these waters, feeding crops on every continent. The few ships that have left the strait since the start of the war were mostly carrying Iranian oil. Traders say crude markets could soar even higher if the strait doesn’t open within days, either with U.S. naval escorts or because shipowners think the danger has receded.
The “good news” is that as of this writing crude is just under $100 a barrel after getting as high as $115. The soft bigotry of low etc.
What’s particularly striking about this is that presidents generally get far too much blame/credit for fluctuations in commodity prices, but this spike is all Donald:
USUALLY presidents getting blame or taking credit for gas prices (or local crime rates, or etc etc) is dumb, because it’s a commodity whose price is set on a global market, USUALLY for reasons having little to do with the White House’s occupant. But this is 100% directly Trump’s fault.
[image or embed]— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) Mar 8, 2026 at 7:36 AM
Mission accomplished.