Tracy Alloway

He's the CEO of a small oil producer in the US yesterday.

And he pointed out there's a fundamental tension here, which is number one, you don't know how long the Iran situation is going to last.

So you could wake up tomorrow and if the

there's some sort of agreement reached, then oil prices immediately plunge lower, which means that they don't have incentive to immediately ramp up production.

And there's also a fundamental tension within the Trump administration itself, which is they keep talking about how they want everyone to drill oil, but at the same time, they want lower gas prices.

And if the drillers don't see profit in encouraging that additional supply, they're not going to start

those new projects.

And so I have yet to see the administration really square those two goals.

Oh, absolutely.

And this is another thing that came up with Jack McClendon, which is this idea that even if you want to start new oil rigs at the moment, a lot of the prices for the components to actually build those drills have gone up because of tariffs.

And in fact, if you look at I'm looking at it right now, the Baker Hughes oil and gas index on my trusty Bloomberg, that thing has been moving sideways dramatically.

basically since mid-2025.

And in recent weeks, when we've had that big oil spike and you might have expected some sort of supply response from U.S.

drillers, it actually fell by three last week.

So here we are.

Yeah, the fertilizer story I find really interesting.

And I've seen the same figures as you, and they seem kind of contradictory at times.

So I'm not entirely sure what to make of where exactly we are in the planting season.

But again, even if you set aside this particular planting season, there's a broader problem here, which is America is not the only food producing nation.

in the world and there are a lot of other countries out there that have different planting seasons and they're going to want the same fertilizer for their particular crops and where are they going to get it if they can't get it from the middle east well china which is a big fertilizer producer has tightened up its export controls because it's concerned about keeping enough supply at home for its own food production and meanwhile the u.s if you look at u.s prices