Not really. It's just that the divergence in price analysis coming out of banks vs the what people in the oil industry are saying is just so ridiculous that I refuse to believe that the hotshot analysts at GS/JPM are that ignorant.
The source is personal knowledge through friends in O&G. SE Asia is going to run out of oil by the end of April. Even if the war ended tomorrow and the strait opened up again, they will continue to be out of oil for months.
US is insulated from practical supply concerns but we’re gonna be paying the price.
The currency is less fundamentally meaningful than the group of purchasers buying their basket of goods.
> Long-term measurements of value are kind of weird
They are worthless. Best case, you’re asking a traveler problem. Does an American tourist rejecting a local Thai delicacy render it worthless? Of course not. They’re different purchasers. Similarly, trying to compare pricing preferences across centuries is borderline voodoo—you’re doing spherical-cow math.
in retrospect, the american obsession and mental sensitivity to gas prices is very curious. The average national gas price in 2008 was about $3.50 which is almost what it is now in 2026. And being a commodity product sold per gallon, there's obviously no shrinkflation or enshittification going on. It's actually remarkably stable in the face of almost 20 years of steady broader inflation.
I understand that the impact to Americans is that for every penny increase in the price of a gallon of gas, averaged over a year, is about $1 billion in consumer spending . So if the average price goes from $2.99 to $3.49 , that’s 50 billion dollars.
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[1] https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
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divergence in price analysis coming out of banks vs the what people in the oil industry are sayingSource for a consensus from oil? The crack spread shows refiners pricing in higher prices [1].
If the domestic refiners and producers can’t agree, why is the homogenous opinion of the banks a conspiracy?
[1] https://rbnenergy.com/market-data/3-2-1-crack-spread
US is insulated from practical supply concerns but we’re gonna be paying the price.
Long-term measurements of value are kind of weird, as your unit of measurement can gain and lose value relative to the units other people are using.
> Long-term measurements of value are kind of weird
They are worthless. Best case, you’re asking a traveler problem. Does an American tourist rejecting a local Thai delicacy render it worthless? Of course not. They’re different purchasers. Similarly, trying to compare pricing preferences across centuries is borderline voodoo—you’re doing spherical-cow math.
At the current geopolitical trajectory, I also doubt $147 is anywhere near the limit of where oil is going.