As Operation Epic Fury rages on in the Middle East, Americans are beginning to feel the costs at home. Gasoline prices have risen, with the national average now sitting at $3.54 per gallon for regular. That is a $0.43 increase from a week ago and a $0.62 increase from last month, according to AAA.
While t national average remains much lower than the pandemic-era peak of just over $5 per gallon, prices could continue to tick up depending on how long the conflict lasts. Crude oil rang in at $86 per barrel Tuesday afternoon, as markets continue to dramatically fluctuate.
The increases are putting new pressure on President Donald Trump’s affordability messaging ahead of the midterm elections. Speaking to reporters on Monday, the president cast the pain at the pump as short term pain for long term gain.
“We’re putting an end to all of this threat once and for all and the result will be lower oil prices, oil and gas prices, for American families,” Trump said. “We’ve done that. We’ve done it. We brought it very low. This was just an excursion into something that had to be done.”
Expert Opinion
On Wednesday’s AM Update, Eric Bolling, who spent 35 years as an oil trader and now hosts The Edge on YouTube, said he has never seen a market situation this volatile:
BOLLING: I’ve never seen I’ve been doing this 36 years. I’ve never seen the volatility like it is right now. I’ve seen markets move up aggressively, and I’ve seen them move down aggressively. But we’re seeing… oil markets specifically going up and down violently – 20, 30 percent of their value – in minutes. I’ve never, ever seen it this nervous. I think it is a function of no one really knows what Trump is going to do; o one really trusts what the Middle Eastern countries are going to do; and the media is just hyping everything that comes out, every news piece, and that’s just adding to the volatility.
Bolling predicted gas prices will likely keep going up:
BOLLING: I will guarantee you – based on just the information, the media, the rhetoric – gasoline will hit a $4 average per gallon, even if the conflict ends tonight, even if it’s over… It takes 45 days to run a barrel of old crude oil through a refinery and get it to the gas stations. So whatever these prices are today, the $100 and $119 yesterday, or the $98 the day after, those prices will eventually make it to the pump, even if things calm down. Let me tell you, the Middle East, between the Persians and the Arabs, have a vested interest in higher prices. So, the longer the conflict draws out, the higher the gasoline price will be. We won’t top out at $4. We could top out at $4.50. We could top out at even $5 a gallon.
So, how long does he think such increases would last?
BOLLING: I don’t know that anyone knows if it’s going to be short term pain or not… For the first time ever, the Iranians are bombing Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, other Arab countries. Persians bombing Arab countries. These are all producing nations… Like I said, it’s going to be at least another 45 days of pain, minimum, based on what’s already happened, before we can even start to think about calming down… Don’t forget, $100 barrel of oil is much better for not only the Iranians but the Saudis and the Abu Dhabis and the UAE and the Kuwaitis and the Omanis. So, there’s a good chance that they’re going to keep this conflict going, even if they say they don’t want it to because… they didn’t like a $55 barrel of oil. They’re loving $100 barrel of oil, and they may get it for some extended period of time if this thing continues, and I don’t see anyone in the Middle East trying to calm it down or tone it down.
Bolling weighed in on the political ramifications at home for the president if gas prices do remain high:
BOLLING: Unfortunately, this is the one Achilles heel that conservatives have, and Trump has a higher oil price… I believe inflation is going to go up based on this and coming off, you know, four years of Biden administration, where inflation was one of the main reasons why he had to step aside… it’s going to be tough to try to downplay inflation, politically, because [the Right] made such a… big deal of it over the last four years. So I think this is very detrimental, and I think it’s in the president’s best interest and the conservative movement’s best interest to solve this as quick as possible.
One possible solution, Bolling said, is for the Trump administration to offer deals to both Venezuela and Iran to create public-private petroleum corporations like Saudi Aramco. Under that structure, the government owns the oil but private companies extract it:
BOLLING: Venezuela produces a million barrels a day right now, but they’ve had the potential… to produce 3 million, 4 million barrels a day… In Iran, they produce about 3 million a day, but they can do up to 7 or 8 million barrels a day. So there’s about a 7 to 9 million barrel increase that that could be extracted from these two countries’ ground, if they were able to get the oil out. But they haven’t, because they’ve been sanctioned and they’ve been corrupted and whatnot. If Trump came in and said, ‘Look… I will take our boot off your neck right now… but you have to cut a deal with our oil companies that we’re going to produce additional barrels of oil from your two reserves and, at market price, we will be the buyer of those… barrels’… The most important thing it does is the gap between what we use, 20 million barrels a day in America, and what we produce, 13 million barrels a day, is 7 million barrels. That literally fills the gap between what we need and what we produce ourselves. So we would never, ever be dependent on one drop of foreign oil ever again.
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