Nobody Could Have Foreseen

Trump continues to deplete stockpiles of expensive & important weapons, gets bases blown up, troops killed & injured, aircraft damaged & radars destroyed, and throws away billions of dollars on his war of aggression while disrupting the global economy and raising cost of living.

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 28, 2026

The price of gas is not going back down, either:

For nearly four weeks, the crude oil market has displayed remarkable resilience, holding together in the face of a 17.8 million barrels-per-day trade flow lost out of the Strait of Hormuz (of which 14.2 million bpd is crude and condensates).

The relatively muted price reaction was possible because the market entered this crisis with a heavily buffered system. But that buffer has disappeared.

The global oil system can no longer absorb shocks the way it could three weeks ago.

Any secondary disruption that would have generated a linear, manageable price response in a buffered system - such as an outage at the CPC pipeline from the Caspian through Russia, an active hurricane season, or infrastructure damage at Yanbu or Fujairah - would now hit a market with no absorptive capacity left.

The floor has moved up.

So has the ceiling.

And critically, the distance between a routine supply event and a disproportionate price move has collapsed.

This is no longer a market that is tight for a couple of weeks, it is a market that will be fragile for longer. That distinction is what the crude oil price does not yet fully reflect.

Before this conflict, the world was expecting a crude oil surplus of roughly 3.0 million bpd this year, onshore and offshore inventories were ample, and there was healthy spare production capacity, albeit very localized.

Those combined "extra" barrels allowed the market to absorb a supply shock that, in any other starting configuration, would have caused prices to react more violently.

Those buffers are now largely consumed, and the system that absorbed the initial shock is not the system operating today. Nearly 500 million barrels of total liquids have been lost in the disruption so far.

The combined policy response of strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) releases by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and waivers of sanctions against Russian and Iranian crude amount to about the same volume. In addition, excluding offshore inventories, the release rate of those policy barrels is far slower than the 17.8 million bpd loss rate of crude and oil products combined.

And Donald Trump’s ignorance is driving the bus:

For example, when he gave a February speech at the US Institute of Peace headquarters building in Washington, DC, which his administration seized from the nonprofit organization last year, he claimed, “It’s brand new, they built it for peace, but nobody occupied it. You know, nobody knew what the purpose of it (was).” In fact, it was known to numerous people in the federal government and in the broader capital that the building had been custom-built as a home for the US Institute of Peace, which had occupied it since 2011.

Was Trump lying, or did he not know this himself and therefore assume nobody else knew either? Nobody knows.

Sometimes Trump says “Nobody knew” to make himself look smart. Sometimes he does it to blind himself to his own ignorance. Either way, we’re going to be paying for it for a long time. Too bad we had no way of knowing….