The coming global oil crisis, mapped and explained

The largest oil shock in history is just weeks away – what’s going to happen when it hits? We dig into futures markets, supply chains, and more to map out how the world economic order is about to be remade.

Max Fisher is a veteran journalist who has reported from over 20 countries. His show, The Bigger Picture, illuminates our world by exploring how it really works, from the sweep of geopolitics to the deepest recesses of our minds. Before going independent, Max was a staff writer at The Atlantic and The Washington Post, a founding editor of Vox, and a long-time foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times, where he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His book, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, was an NPR and New Yorker best book of 2022.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    13·
    8 days ago

    The US is only insulated until:

    1. US oil companies don’t export that oil instead because it fetches a higher price anywhere they can ship it and the US gets to use it as soft power projection over Europe/Asia/Africa.

    2. It imports anything, with the cost becoming too high for most goods

    3. The global economic depression it causes kills foreign investment in the US economy and demand for US exports.

    4. The US dollar weakens from the crisis while the yuan continues to gain more global usage.

    We’re insulated from it for a few more weeks than most other countries. I’m not at all confident that will last though. May or June is when I think the domestic impacts will start becoming more noticeable than the cost of fuel alone. This seems like it might be the straw that pops the AI bubble’s back, collapses the social safety net entirely, and introduces broad consumer good inflation/shortages on top of impacting fuel/lubricant/plastic cost and availability. Last year things were so economically bad that my department was rationing fuel and begging us to minimise driving. This year the cost of everything will rise in response to the crisis while the zombie economy contracts and isolates. That’s so chaotic that I’m betting it will be historically disruptive, at least to the 1973 level if not 1929. If it somehow works out and nothing ever happens, I had a cheap year saving money and exploring my region. If it doesn’t then the closest lived model I have is 2008 and that was so bad that it made me a Marxist.

    edit: And I told them. I done told them. For the cost of one new fancy pickup truck, they could buy like 40 of my cargo bike at retail price and outfit our entire system with something that gets most of the job done. They said ohhhhhhhh but happybadger we need the big pickup truck. Think about the carrying capacity we can’t use now.