Chapter 1: What are the immediate effects of the Iran war on gas prices?
You know, they've said this about a lot of things. No other president could do some of this shit I'm doing.
That's probably true. President Trump continues to give mixed messages about the war in Iran. Mr. President, you've said the war is, quote, very complete, but your defense secretary says this is just the beginning. So which is it and how long should Americans be prepared for this war? Well, I think you could say both. More clear is what's happening to the U.S.
and global economies as a result of this conflict. Markets falling like Liberation Day, the sequel. Oil prices up like we haven't seen in years. That means gas prices up. That means other prices will go up. Trump's supposed to be focusing on affordability. His party has a midterm election to try to win. He talked to Republican lawmakers yesterday.
So our message is simple. Democrats created the high prices and our policies are totally ending them. And they're ended and we're doing better. We're even bringing them down further.
Chapter 2: How are global economies impacted by the conflict in Iran?
Self-evidently untrue. Will the economic fallout of the war in Iran catch up with Trump? We're going to ask on Today Explained. Support for the program today comes from Atio, the AI CRM for modern teams. Are you a modern team? Are we a modern team? Atio connects to your email, calendar, calls, product data, billing data, and more.
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Mike Bird, Wall Street editor at leading magazine The Economist. Is the war in Iran already affecting the U.S. economy? Yes, is the short answer. Oil prices move very quickly to account for future conditions and current conditions, and that is fed almost immediately into gas prices. Americans are feeling the pain at the pump.
The widening war is rattling investors around the world, sending oil prices soaring.
The price of crude oil has risen above $100 a barrel as the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed and Iranian fuel depots are battered.
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Chapter 3: What is the relationship between oil prices and inflation?
At the moment... There's been a lot going on in markets already this year. There's been a lot of worry about AI and technology companies and how things will be affected and private credit and borrowing at the slightly less credit worthy end of business borrowing in the US.
So the S&P, you know, a broad index of stocks, been very volatile, more or less at the time of speaking, hasn't really gone anywhere this year. Yeah. Stocks are down across the board. It is an historic day in the market. Good for people who have their retirements in the stock market.
Wall Street's main indexes tumbled on Friday.
Stocks end the day higher. The stock market plunging. There's been a lot of ups. There's been a lot of downs. I would say it's been generally down the past few days because of all of this volatility. I think there's just a lot of uncertainty as to how long all of this lasts.
As much as there is uncertainty over exactly what form the pressure on the oil market takes, the bigger question is just, is this something that's going to be over by the end of the week and there's going to be a sort of an embarrassing withdrawal and a walk back? So we're winning very... Decisively. We're way ahead of schedule.
Or is it something that we're going to be talking about in six months' time?
If it starts up again, they'll be hit even harder.
And your guess is as good as anyone else's on this matter. Let's say it does drag on beyond the week, beyond the month even. What about other economic indicators, things like inflation and growth? What do you envision happening? Absolutely. Well, for the same reason that energy prices inform prices all across the economy, you would expect this to be inflationary.
It doesn't mean it's going to be an absolutely explosive impact. What you are going to get in the US is you're going to get oil producers moving to drill and produce more, precisely because this is the sort of signal they look at. Oil hits certain amounts, it tips over for certain business models, and they say, okay, yep, let's get drilling on that slightly more marginal patch or whatever.
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Chapter 4: How does the war in Iran affect the U.S. economy?
The president has asked investors and the American public in general to sort of look through these what he calls short-term effects
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, we've done that. We've done it. We brought it very low.
This was just... I think one thing we did see with the tariffs last year, and that is a big matter for debate among investors and traders and analysts, is there is this idea that the market is a disciplining factor on the president, on the White House, that basically he doesn't like seeing the red line go down and that there is only so much of the sort of negative press that he's willing to put up with.
Whether that transpires to be true, and most importantly, how much of it you need to see before it transpires to be true, is not clear at all. Last year, it allowed for the reduction of tariffs. The tariffs didn't go away, obviously. You know, the tariffs are still really largely in place by various means.
So what that means for something as complicated as this, because it's a military endeavor, is very, very unclear.
Yeah.
I want to ask you about something Trump said. It was about a week ago, but it was a really interesting moment. He was in the Oval, and he was asked if he was worried about higher oil prices.
I'll tell you what, I have never had more compliments on something I did. People felt it's something that had to be done.
So if we have a little high oil prices for a little while, but as soon as this ends, those prices are going to drop. Okay, so a little mangled there, but what the president is saying is— When it's over, oil prices will immediately go back to normal. What does that depend on? Let's say we want to envision a world where we can get oil prices back down to where they were three weeks ago.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications for farmers due to rising energy costs?
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Chapter 6: How does the conflict impact the Gulf region's economy?
And at the same time, they're also spending a lot of money to fight this in wages war. All right. So we know in the United States that oil prices, gas prices at the pump are going up. So we're seeing it firsthand. But it's not just in the United States, right? Oil from the Gulf goes all over the world. Tell me about the other ripple effects here. Yeah. So actually, the U.S.
imports very little oil from the Gulf. But the rest of the world, China, Japan, South Korea, large parts of Europe, India, Pakistan, they need this oil. This allows them to do everything, right? To run their factories, to run their power plants and become the industrial and manufacturing power hubs that many of these countries are today. So they have a crucial interest in that.
And then it just feeds through the global economy. It's a global commodity. It rises somewhere or there's a crunch somewhere. It goes up everywhere. What else is produced in the Gulf that we're seeing held up at this point? The big one, and this is one that maybe doesn't get as much attention, is liquefied natural gas. Qatar is one of the biggest producers of liquefied natural gas in the world.
It's what made Qatar wealthy. In the 90s, they took this bet, went out and developed an offshore field and built up, they're called the liquefaction plants. They have 14 trains and they produce 77 million tons of LNG per year. Most of that LNG goes to East Asia and to Europe.
And now Qataris have stopped producing it completely because as far as the Qataris say, and we've seen evidence of that, one of their plants was hit by an Iranian drone. And these are very complex and sensitive production lines. You can imagine gas is being pumped through and then it's chilled down and any type of spark around there would just blow everything up.
So they really had to shut it down for safety reasons. And the other factor is you can't really store it anywhere. So, you know, you can load it onto ships, but then the ships become these, you know, floating bombs. So they just shut down production completely. Generally speaking, there are supplies right now, but we will start to see the perhaps rationing of power and so on.
But the other commodities, I don't know how much you think about helium and fertilizer and all that stuff. It also comes from this region. Ah, okay. So at a certain point, farmers start feeling this, yeah? Correct. Farmers, tech companies, right? Helium is not only used to make balloons, you know, rise and float and to...
And to make your voice sound funny, helium is also used in precision manufacturing and to create semiconductors and MRI machines. So helium is this crucial component. It's a byproduct of natural gas production. And Qatar is one of the bigger producers in the world, if not the biggest. Wow. Wow. When and how did the Gulf region become so central to the global economy?
Since oil was found, obviously Saudi Arabia became a crucial source of supply during World War II.
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Chapter 7: What ripple effects does the Iran war have on global oil supply?
The populations themselves, the people who were living there, there wasn't enough demand for domestic development because they were such small populations. So they built up their economies to serve them, but there was surplus, massive amounts of money that was surplus. And What were they to do with this money? A lot of it was recycled through U.S.
assets, Western assets, and then they became larger and larger. Right now, Gulf sovereign wealth funds control maybe four, four and a half trillion dollars of wealth that is projected to increase to about seven trillion dollars in the next four or five years. You know, that's serious money.
Other industries are now bigger even than oil, which is always going to be a big monster. It's a big one.
And the other parts of the economy that they've developed next to it, there's a high precision aluminum manufacturing because that requires energy. They bought a lot of planes. If you've ever traveled to this region, you know about the airlines, Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways.
This is Qatar Airways, the world's best for a record ninth time.
trade links. So they built ports and then once their ports became efficient in the Gulf, these were great routes to bring in products from Asia to Europe and beyond to Africa. Then those port companies went out and bought ports in Africa. They built up their warehousing. They became central nodes of logistic hubs throughout the world. These are industries that are crucial to global trade.
We know that businesses and investors really hate instability and nothing gives instability like an outright war. Is the rest of the world looking around and thinking the Gulf is no longer reliable? The Gulf is no longer safe. We got to find other options.
If you want to be close to a well-organized, efficiently run economies with access to incredible amounts of energy, if you're an AI company and you need to build data centers, you will look at the Gulf. You will look at this instability and consider ways to mitigate it. Are there ways to protect an AI data center or infrastructure? or other types of investments that you're making.
But absolutely, if you don't have to be there and you're concerned about risks, this could be the time where you start to reconsider and you start to slow down investments and you maybe diversify a bit and go somewhere else where there's fewer drones or fewer missiles hitting.
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