White House Weighs Defense Production Act as U.S. Refineries Maxed Out
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Diesel just broke $6 a gallon nationwide for the first time in U.S. history, and Jeff Currie says $5 gasoline is likely to land before midterms.
The founder and CEO of Real Macro, who spent more than a decade running Goldman Sachs’ commodities research desk, told Bloomberg Television on Friday that the odds of average U.S. gasoline hitting $5 a gallon before the November midterms are “extremely high.”
AAA data released the same day put the national diesel average at $6.0556, a record that’s up 14 percent in a month and more than 60 percent from a year ago. Regular gasoline sits near $4.27, according to AAA.
Currie’s case rests on refiners running out of room to maneuver. Plants can shift production between gasoline and diesel to chase whichever fuel is scarcer, but that flexibility has limits, and Currie argues the market is close to testing them. He told Bloomberg diesel could climb to $7 to $9 a gallon before the squeeze eases.
“Crude is the signal, and now we think about products,” Currie said. “They are the noise.”
He made a similar case on CNBC on Thursday, tying the fuel squeeze to a longer story about underinvestment in physical supply. Brent crude’s push above $107 a barrel this week is “harder to dismiss as a temporary shock,” he said, pointing to Chinese refiners restarting units to chase diesel margins that have blown out to $110 a barrel, more than the price of the crude that feeds them. “That’s a pretty big profit,” Currie said. “They start chasing it, brought those refineries back online, and it was just like an earthquake going through here.”
“The old economy is taking its revenge,” he added. “You see it in the rates markets. You see it in the commodity markets. ... This is not transient. It has a different flavor to it.”
Crude itself stayed volatile. Brent nearly touched $110 overnight before slipping back to around $103 by Friday morning after the International Energy Agency warned that soaring fuel costs could trigger demand destruction.
Prices are still up more than 70 percent this year, pressured by a disrupted Strait of Hormuz and a fresh Houthi claim of a strike on Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, the kingdom’s main workaround for shipping crude to the Red Sea. “A resumption of a full-blown Saudi-Houthi war would be a potential catalyst for our high oil price scenario coming to fruition,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Helima Croft wrote in a note.
The pain is already spreading beyond the pump. GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan said record diesel prices will touch “every cargo, shipment, every delivery Americans are taking,” and warned of a costlier holiday season if geopolitical tensions hold.
What I Cover My focus spans the global energy landscape and the technologies reshaping it, specifically focusing on oil and gas, renewables, and tech-driven market…
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