Oil Futures Bleak!
But we'll all have sexy legs from biking?
Remember how a bunch of low-information voters — that inexplicable some 4 to 6-ish percent of people who also voted for Barack Obama and also Joe Biden, or who previously didn’t vote at all — came out for Trump in ‘24 because of The Groceries and The Gas and The Inflation and the Masculine Penis Insecurities or whatever?
Bad news, weirdos! The Gas prices have surged 20 percent over the past two weeks, after the Strait of Hormuz — which connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman and through which 30 percent of the world’s boat-shipped oil and 20 percent of its natural gas flows — was deemed by insurance companies to be too dangerous to allow tankers to go through after the US attack on Feb. 28. And so now nearly all tanker traffic there is at an indefinite standstill and there’s a line of about 3,000 boats with some 20,000 crew members stuck. And Iran has been jamming ships’ GPS systems, making it dangerous for them to try to move.
And at least 18 ships have already been hit by Iran, including three more tankers struck by projectiles or burning shrapnel in the Gulf just Wednesday night, and two more Thursday, one of which may have been American-owned. But Pete Hegseth insists the Strait is actually OPEN: “The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that.”
The highway is open for you to go lie down on it! The only thing prohibiting you from doing so are the cars and trucks, and also several hundred murder drones hovering above you. And a land mine or two. Get out there, what are you, some kind of a chicken ladypussy?
Pete’s correct in one way, though, the Strait of Hormuz is open for Iran’s pal China, and tankers bound for there have gone through without a hitch. Not that China even needs it that much, they’ve been reducing their dependence on oil for decades. And Trump just lifted sanctions on Russian oil, too, letting them go about their business. Toot toot, mothercluckers! In their wildest dreams Xi and Putin could not have imagined Trump’s presidency going so well for them. Ukraine and Taiwan are now wide open too, Callooh! Callay!
Meanwhile, Trump’s fracking-fluid-chugging Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNBC on Thursday that the US Navy is “not ready” to escort oil tankers through the Strait. Guess Pete’s got a lot of chicken ladypussies in his Navy. John Kerry would have done it!
But so to recap, the Dept. of WAR went to WAR without enough drone interceptors to last it a week, much less achieve air superiority, has been planning its bombings using 15-year-old maps, and struck with no plan in place for getting tankers through the Strait. SUPERIOR WARFIGHTING!!
Just tie Pete Hegseth to a prow and send that boat through with his perky little nipples first so he can show all those dress-and-wig-wearing Navy admirals and pronouns-in-bio oil tanker captains how safe it is! Get his figurehead doing something more useful than holding up some hair gel and trying to make an apocalypse!
But until the day anyone starts taking Wonkette’s advice, there is no world peace in sight. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismantled all international diplomacy to build a piss-off-the-whole-world machine. Trump could have done nothing at all and left Obama’s 2018 non-proliferation agreement with Iran in place. He could have let green energy develop so the US doesn’t get 40 percent of its oil from foreign sources. But that’s so him. He also could have done nothing at all when he inherited old Fred’s fortune, lived off of the interest and not bankrupted six companies, including two casinos. It’s never really been about the money, just like rape is never really about sex. And this post is supposed to REALLY be about oil futures, and we digressed!
The Future Is Oil
Oil futures! Their price has been soaring. Not just because of the Strait situation, but also the widespread and growing infrastructure damage across 11 countries so far that could take years to repair. Global oil futures are kind of like a contract you’d sign if you have oil heat in your house. You can choose to pay a monthly rate that may vary, or you can fill the tank at one locked-in price, which is a way of betting that the price will go up instead of down. Energy traders are doing the same thing, betting the price will go up, and that their $100-a-barrel oil will sell for like $500 in the future. However, most of these trades are done on margin, pre-Great-Depression-style: The trader puts up a percentage of that, like 2-12 percent. So, if the price falls before the contract is up, a futures trader (and therefore the market) gets that much that much more exponentially screwed. Like if you bought a $100 tankful, but put $12 down, then owed the rest of the balance a year later, then multiply by billions of tanks that you contracted to all sell for $100 each to your neighbors in a year. And you borrowed the $12, too.
There’s also been rumors that the US has considered getting involved in the oil derivatives market (another term for “oil futures,” as in a market derived from the oil-commodity trade), which could make what analysts call a “Biblical disaster,” if prices went down and the Treasury then got stuck with a massive bill, though Scott Bessent denies they’re considering it. And according to the Financial Times, the government’s boneheaded and discombobulated moves already are affecting the oil trade:
Oil fell sharply on Tuesday after a post on X by energy secretary Chris Wright that surprised traders by saying the US Navy had escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. The message was deleted minutes later, and the White House later denied that the navy had escorted a ship through the waterway.
The 32 member states of the International Energy Agency (IEA) have held an emergency meeting to assess the situation, and dozens of countries agreed to release about 400 million barrels of oil from their strategic reserves, including the US. But that announcement did not make prices go down by much, and it will take about 120 days for a release to happen. In the meantime, expect the price of The Gas and therefore The Groceries and every other commodity that you don’t grow in your own back yard to be going up, up, and up. And the deficit, well, if those DOGE boys were crying about the wastefulness of arts grants going to Jewish writers, they’re going to have absolute strokes now.
Sounds like … Dire Straits.
[Good Authority / WSJ / Sky News / Financial Times archive link]
It all makes sense when you consider the possibility that Trump is dying and knows it, and wants to bring the whole world down with him because we didn’t love him as much as he felt entitled to.
Remember, this is the guy the American Psychiatric Association in 2015 called the worst case of malignant narcissism ever seen in the wild, and he’s only become worse in the last decade.
Well they just announced that a Marine Expeditionary Force is on its way to the Persian Gulf.
Get ready for the ground war everyone.