It’s The…

He makes a persuasive case. pic.twitter.com/aMeCcrhyoo

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 29, 2026

This man is quite persuasive, almost sensible. Where is he now?

US government officials and Wall Street analysis are starting to consdier the prospect that oil prices might surge to an unprecedeted $200 a barrel. https://t.co/BBbij6nC5y

— Bloomberg (@business) March 29, 2026

White House modeling $200. Macquarie: 40% probability if Hormuz stays closed through June. Bloomberg Economics: $170 is the stagflationary threshold. BlackRock: $150 triggers recession. Brent was $73 in January. It's $112 today. Asian diesel already topped $200 in spot markets.…

— The Tectonic (@thetect0nic) March 29, 2026

White House modeling $200. Macquarie: 40% probability if Hormuz stays closed through June. Bloomberg Economics: $170 is the stagflationary threshold. BlackRock: $150 triggers recession. Brent was $73 in January. It's $112 today. Asian diesel already topped $200 in spot markets. Pakistan rationing fuel. Australia reporting shortfalls. TotalEnergies CEO: "more than three or four months and it becomes a systemic problem for the world." The war is 30 days old. The diplomacy is in Islamabad without Washington. My conclusion: $200 is what the models say happens if nothing changes.

What if it gets worse?

$200/bbl isn't the story. The story is that Q2 BAF surcharges are still being set on Q1 averages. Rotterdam VLSFO is already at $746/mt with Brent at $112.57, and every $10/bbl adds ~$73/mt to vessel fuel costs. Container rates are sitting at $3,777/box today and haven't priced…

— Supply Signal (@SupplySignalAI) March 29, 2026

$200/bbl isn't the story. The story is that Q2 BAF surcharges are still being set on Q1 averages. Rotterdam VLSFO is already at $746/mt with Brent at $112.57, and every $10/bbl adds ~$73/mt to vessel fuel costs. Container rates are sitting at $3,777/box today and haven't priced any of this in. The real supply chain bill doesn't arrive until May.

And then comes the harvest:

Within 48 hours, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a 21-mile-wide channel between Iran and Oman through which 20 percent of the world’s oil travels every single day.¹ A third of the world’s fertilizer travels through that same strait.² And it needed to arrive this month. The planting window does not wait so timely delivery is unwaveringly critical within the planting window.

Here is what nitrogen does to a corn plant. Applied at the right moment in the growing cycle, it drives the plant to produce grain. Cut the application in half and you do not get half a crop. The corn plant runs out of nitrogen mid-growth and stops producing. Farmers across the Northern Hemisphere are making their nitrogen purchases right now, ahead of spring planting. The ships carrying that nitrogen are anchored on the wrong side of a closed strait, or rerouting around the southern tip of Africa, adding weeks to delivery schedules and close to a million dollars in additional fuel costs per voyage.³

Urea, the most widely traded nitrogen fertilizer, cost $475 per metric ton at the Port of New Orleans the week before the war started. It cost $683 the following week.⁴ That is a 44 percent price increase in seven days. The American Farm Bureau, which does not typically use alarm language, called it a “double whammy” and warned that if farmers cannot get fertilizer in time, we will see reductions in planted acreage and lower yields across the country.⁵

There is no strategic reserve for fertilizer. The United States maintains a Strategic Petroleum Reserve for oil. There is no equivalent for nitrogen.⁶ When the supply runs short, farmers absorb the price, reduce their application, or switch crops. The harvest pays for it in the fall.

Mind you, I grew up on apocalyptic visions, and I don’t mean the Biblical stuff. Death by nuclear holocaust was the fare of ‘50’s movies I watched on television. “The Twilight Zone” was just as dramatic, with simply good narratives (it was a running theme for the entire time the show was in the air) in place of any special effects. I read Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb decades before I learned it was based on the 18th century ravings of Malthus (the English class system turned into “science” and so, inevitablity, and the foundations of Darwinism and Social Darwinism, which are really the same coin). The excuse for the failure of that bomb to explode was the “Green Revolution.” That is, science fed people. With? Petroleum based fertilizer. 

Ironic, no?  Also the reason for a desire for “organic” farming. Equal and opposite reactions. Except not equal. But reactions, nonetheless. (The true failure was the 18th century analysis, but science cannot fail, it can only be failed. Or improved on, by more science. The true failure”scientific method.” Ask Kuhn.)

Reactions are what change predictions of the future. Predictions are always simplistic. They rest on a handful of factors. Reality is always more complex. Weather prediction cannot examine all the factors of the next day. It can only make generalized guesses, which can be fairly accurate for 24, maybe 48, hours. But useless beyond that. Weather forecasting says a new hurricane season will be active; and then it is not so. Or it’s worse. Or it’s right. Only time will tell. 

So, is the U.S. set for an apocalyptic collapse because the Strait of Hormuz shut down 48 hours after the bombs started falling on Iraq? Maybe. Maybe not. Too many factors, too many variables. And too much attention to be provided by predicting apocalyptic disaster on a national, or a global, scale. Look at it this way:

47,900,000 Americans went hungry last year. The USDA counts a household as food insecure when its members cannot reliably access enough food to eat. In 7.2 million of those households, someone skipped a full meal or went an entire day without eating because there was no money. 14 million of them were children.

Did you even notice?

I’m not being cruel or callous, but apocalypse always comes out of nowhere and always wipes the slate clean. That’s biblical idea: apocalypse is the revealing upon which there is no going back. But if the apocalypse is the status quo, is it still apocalyptic?

2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted grain exports from one of the world’s largest wheat-producing regions. That disruption, which hit grain rather than the inputs that grow grain, produced 13.5 percent grocery inflation at its peak in the United States.⁷ Bread up 13 percent. Dairy up 12 percent. Meat up 10 percent. MST Marquee’s head of energy research has called the current disruption three times more severe than the 1973 Arab oil embargo.⁸ The 1973 embargo removed 5 percent of global oil supply. This one removes 20 percent by closing the Strait entirely, and it does so while simultaneously severing the fertilizer supply for the spring planting season, during the deepest cuts to American food assistance in the program’s history.⁹

Simon Johnson, MIT economist and 2024 Nobel laureate, put it plainly: “There is no excess capacity anywhere in the world that can fill that gap.”¹⁰ Maurice Obstfeld, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, said the effects will be most devastating in low-income countries where agricultural productivity is already challenged, and that adding this cost component produces “the prospect of significant food shortages.”¹¹

Obstfeld was talking about the world. He could have been talking about the U.S.

We don’t actually know how many Americans are food insecure right now. The USDA published its annual food security report every year for three decades. In September 2025, the administration cancelled it.¹² The last official number, 47.9 million, describes conditions in 2024. That was before new SNAP work requirements began removing people from the program. Before the deepest cuts to food assistance in the program’s history cleared Congress. Before the first bomb fell.

This is bad, don’t get me wrong. But it doesn’t reach American daily life unless it reaches the daily life that counts. (Sad, but true. And I’m speaking in the context of electoral politics, which has fuck all, in the final analysis, to do with morality. Also bad, but true.) Like Covid did. And even then, we (the people) didn’t understand what was happening. We rejected the reality of the disease, even as it killed us; we rejected the consequences of the disease and the need to slow it down.  And even though the U.S. economy recovered better than almost any other country on the planet (thanks to Biden), IT WASN’T GOOD ENOUGH! And so we rejected Biden and Harris and figured the guy who fucked us the last time was the guy who would unfuck things this time.

Covid was an apocalypse; a revealing. And it cost us a lot. But it didn’t teach us anything. Except how weak our systems are; especially when we rely on them to do it for us.

That’s all the fertilizer crisis is; another reminder that our systems won’t save us from ourselves. Except they won’t destroy us, either. People will die. People will go hungry. People will suffer. That’s what happened during Covid. And what did we do about it? What did we do, through our political systems, do about it?

We re-elected the idiot who made it worse.

So what will we do about this crisis? Will we notice? Or will we vote based on grocery prices, and who promises to lower the price of eggs this time? Will our systems fix things? Or will we just vote out the incumbents again? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss?

And what will we learn?  Except that we want food costs to go down. Oh, and No Kings. We want no kings.

But mostly, it’s food prices. Because almost entirely, it’s the economy, stupid. The rest is mostly wishful thinking.