The USA was doing something to guarantee that stuff can flow through it, then they start a war, now they can no longer guarantee this?
Did they suddenly loose the power to protect this flow?
Just because USA is war mongering, doesn't mean no one else would have stepped up or that it wouldn't be better without all of this involvment.
And yeah, USA might do dumb things that put them into a bind, but ultimately the peaceful flow of traffic through Hormuz is a goal worth pursuing for the world economic health.
isn't correct. There are plenty of people on HN working in military contract industries, high tech arms manufacturing and such. They lobby Gov and benefit financially as do their employees.
If I worked in military R&D I’d be worried that focus might shift away from the more speculative/less delivery-oriented/fun to work on products…
Military contractors do well when the military has widespread support from the voters. Congresscritters will happily approve tax dollars going to the military industrial complex when their constituents view the US as the global protector of democracy. Wars like this one that aren't popular and make us look like thugs open the floor up to anti-military candidates. So yeah, the companies building missiles do well while the war is on, but the people like me who automate military fuel farms see budget cuts and projects cancelled.
if everyone believes the straight of hormuz is open, even if it is not, even if 20% less oil is being moved globally, what happens to oil prices? what happens to oil deliveries?
is it possible for oil to be cheap in America while Bangladesh experiences shortages, instead of everyone paying more?
is oil the same as energy? or is it more relevant to transportation?
does it matter? suburban life is quite comfortable, a LOT of people keep choosing big single family home with yard, drive everywhere. driving everywhere is VERY comfortable. a lot of people like it. are they willing to pay more for it? does buying a house that is MUCH cheaper by virtue of being far away from a city stop making sense for 250m americans just because gas is 50% more expensive?
Train’s move around vast amounts of freight but they got optimized for coat per ton for coal, wheat, etc not latency. Which then plays havoc if you try and do just in time manufacturing etc using them. Airfare is simply dominated by fuel costs.
We’ve had $4 gas before (20 years ago?!) and it was annoying but it didn’t end the world.
Half of that.
According to the US Census, median household income in 2024 was $80,000. Add federal and state income tax* of 30%, and you're left with $56,000. Rent in lower-cost areas is around $12,000 ($1k/mo.) and health insurance (assuming ACA, not fancy private plans) is another $7000. Utility prices vary wildly but average something like $450-500 (so $6000 per year). if you don't live in a particularly high-cost area and skip luxuries like home Internet service or media subscriptions.
That's just over $30,000 left over per year for all household expenses, including "luxuries" like food, clothes, and car and home maintenance. Heaven forbid you have loans (car, student, etc.) or any revolving credit debt.
The difference between $5k and $10k in fuel costs is therefore easily 15% vs. 35% of total "inessential" spending. With food and other goods consistently been driven up by inflation and tariffs, there's just no margin for an "average" family.
(Sources vary for the above; US Census comes data from its own website, rent from TIME, health costs from Forbes, and utilities from move.org. Feel free to find better reference numbers if you doubt the above.)
*- yes, not all states charge income tax; most of the ones that don't have other taxes (sales, gas, property) to make up the gap
The USA is responsible for this horrendes situation, the USA people will not be the people struggling and dying.
Its the poor people in every country around the globe which literaly will die, while the rich countries will just continue doing whatever they were doing.
Holidays, traveling to visit famiily and friends. It will cost more for sure but you will still do it.
The poor can't afford the food anymore because cooking becomes more expensive. going to your daily job becomes more expensive. The likelyhood of people is getting destroyed beecause the small jobs, the niche jobs are suddenly uprooted. Like the small tuktuk or the cheap and dangerous bus for 6 people is too expensive suddenly.
I think the US has been ramping up domestic oil production for a while, creating an interesting situation where (global) prices are high but (domestic) supply is healthy. Prices are up at the pump in the US, but I'm not sure how much of that OPEC+ price-fixing or "risk premium".
This means that "domestic production" does not mean what you imply (which is "domestic production that must be sold in the US.") If US producers can make more money selling 100% of domestic production overseas, they will do that.
This is not price-fixing, it is the predictable outcome of a market design where US drivers bid against Asian airlines for petroleum products.
a lot of people like it.
because it took YEARS for Obama's team to get them to sign something
and he's already used up half of US war stockpiles
Iran's dictators will eat and sleep just fine for years while their people starve and get bombed to death
click on YTD here and imagine that flat-line for YEARS
https://en.macromicro.me/charts/94482/imf-strait-of-hormuz-n...
It is funny watching economies like Japan -- where their new prime minister was fluffing Trump like crazy -- get fully screwed.
I can see sanctions though, maybe a re-shuffling of alliances where China becomes the world's default Adult In The Room.
There are many ways in which inflation numbers are cooked; just one of them is the hedonic adjustment [1].
Others include an un-representative basket of goods.
The basket of goods is adjusted every 2 years, but not necessarily in a way that mirrors the way real households adapt their spending patterns to increased prices.
Owner equivalent rent (LOL) massively lags behind home prices.
Honestly, when 10s or hundreds of millions of people's perception does not match *Official Government Numbers*, then it's reason to suspect that the official numbers are a poor metric.
You are on HN, the chance you are part of the american average is very low.
That 15% cost is not relevant if you don't drink milk. Its also a lot less if you are able to save money. That money saved might be for something very specific like one specific car or a house.
The house market, as far as i understand it, is more decoupled from inflation than not. Here in germany a farm costs still 600k and goes up and down based on location and other factors. My money in the bank doesn't has to be inflation neutral, it should be house market neutral for the money i only want to buy a house for.
You can also choose and change your buying power. Instead of the sports car x, you can buy y. Instead of buying the city center house, you can buy the farm outside.
You are on HN, the chance you are part of the american average is very low.
This is not US politics. Its global politics and it affects me as well. Independent of this, hn is not a platform the avg person is visiting. It requires a certain amount of high tech expertise to understand the conent of hn which statistically pushes the avg hn reader above the avg person.
You do know how much impact the USA has around the globe right? right?!
Example report https://mymarketnews.ams.usda.gov/filerepo/sites/default/fil...
For example, your store might be competing for business using the headline price of eggs and making it up on milk and bread. In our city, Whole Foods was the cheapest non-warehouse place to buy eggs for a while. Anecdotally, it looks like one could save a relatively large % on various goods simply by going to a different store, which was not the case a few short years ago.
Relative pricing stability appears to have collapsed, shopping is more intellectually-intensive now.
* Demonstrated that the US simply can't offer any meaningful security guarantee to it's middle east partners.
* Permanently ceded de facto control over the straits of Hormuz to Iran
* Significantly strengthened the hardliners in the Iranian regime and cleared the way for them to have absolute power by eliminating all moderates
* Spiked inflation at home and doubled down on pissing off pretty much every single country except Russia by heaping sky rocketing energy costs on them
* Exposed the perilous state of of the defense industrial base (in spite of us spending more than the next 10 countries combined). We simply can't produce enough military hardware to sustain a sustained conflict with a country like Iran. I shudder to think just how badly we will be outmatched in a shooting war with China.
All of this to get to a point where we are negotiating a deal which is worse than what we already had with the JCPOA.
I think we will look back on this as the US version of the Suez crisis, the beginning of the end of the US empire.
The stock market did, which is amazing if you're the top 10% of asset owners who own 50% of the country's wealth.
>except Russia by heaping sky rocketing energy costs on them
Russia doesn't benefit from this energy spike, since its biggest customers, China and India, have long term contracts that Russia can't just rip and renegotiate to charge spot prices, since they're in a pickle right now and depend on imports to keep the war going while not being able to sell to too many nations so they're stuck watching potential earnings go past them.
Why does the market seem so disconnected from the general economy?
That said, it seems that the stock market is doing well in spite of this war, and not because of it. Who knows how long that will last
No? https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/11/iran-war-russia-putin-t...
> Data suggests that Moscow has already made billions of dollars of additional
> revenue from oil sales because of higher crude prices, as well as the fact
> that the United States temporarily rescinded sanctions on Russia to rein in
> global costsA study a few years ago gave the US just 1 week before all its missiles were depleted with China in just a naval war.
Obviously it's not NET positive, but if I had to highlight one positive for the US from their perspective, setting most of our guided munitions on fire overnight breaks the military, and the suspicion is that it breaks the military at a time when China is not quite yet prepared to invade Taiwan. It is now in a widely acknowledged catastrophic munitions stockpile crisis which Congress will have to fix via large, sustained investment; Increasing procurement rates for many systems by an order of magnitude on the low end. A year ago, and 10 years ago, and 25 years ago, it was in a severe munitions stockpile crisis according to everyone who's ever ran a wargame or tried to figure out deterrence policy for a non-nuclear shooting war
After the Cold War, we basically reduced most munitions stockpiles to a level consistent with a Desert Storm scale operation, but kept paying exorbitant amounts of money to keep defense contractors technically alive, producing a handful of units a year at costs that pay for the overhead of existing. In areas like naval procurement, the contradictions entailed by this approach combined with neoliberal austerity posturing and a lackadaisical response to delays, have combined to turn almost every major shipbuilding effort since the Cold War into an expensive failure. We are spending a remarkable amount of money on military equipment and probably getting 5% of what we would get if we spent twice that much and emphasized industrial performance rather than contractor sustainment.
A year ago, Congress and the Pentagon were carefully ignoring this for political reasons, while the MIC & foreign policy blob believes China was looking at it as an opportunity.
How exactly is it positive to waste munition and thus force the congress to buy new munition? You will spend a huge amount of money to ... get where you was.
Unfortunately not the case. There are an odd number of refinery issues happening across the US lately.
Until this year, US military bases were seen as an asset. They were thought to deter attacks, and in the case of someone being crazy enough to attack the country that hosted a US military base, they sold the promise of a quick and decisive response.
But for countries in the Middle East, every base was nothing but a liability with nothing but a long list of detriments. The bases got attacked and destroyed with basically zero effort whatsoever, local militaries had to step up to defend the US bases on their own dime and with their own people putting their lives on the line, and the bases basically just served as provocation and ended up with the countries being attacked as "punishment" for letting the US military operate on their land. And the US put in the bare minimum effort, if any, to defend the countries being attacked. It was basically "that's on you. Buzz off".
Europe is now being threatened with having their US bases cut back/removed entirely and I'm not sure if people are even worried anymore. People have been using the term "paper tiger" to refer to Russia these past 4 years because their efforts at war have been absolutely embarrassing. Somehow the US has made Russia look competent, and despite being against all the BS America did in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, I didn't think America would somehow show itself to be more rotted out from the inside than Russia. I always assumed the US was competent, albeit war hungry. But somehow competence has completely vanished.
And right now, East Asian allies of the US operate under the very wrong assumption that the US will back them up if China/Russia/North Korea tries something. And now that those countries know the US won't do shit, there's a non zero chance that they've taken war plans from purely hypothetical plans to "we could actually do this" plans.
It was pushed out, by force.
As a US citizen, I hope more countries come to this realization and start rejecting these.
It's such a lose-lose for everyone
The establishment and maintenance of these bases cost the tax payers so much....
If only we could refocus this massive expenditure of resources to internal domestic infrastructure...
I say this as an anti-empirical leftist with no great sympathy for the effort, but for those proclaiming to put America's interests above all else it's just such an obvious and idiotic short-sighted self-own.
They supported USA's hegemony, extension of soft powers - essentially (not a quote) 'we trade with USA because they're our partner, they help us with defence against tyrants'. Except, when USA vote in a fascist tyrant.
Many bridges have been burned.
USA is just like a company taken over by venture capitalists, and just like such a company those capitalists look like they'll run it into the ground and make off with all the money.
The US bases are also pretty expensive to set up. Lots of logistic support has to be in place to let those bases function. That require a lot of support from the host country. Normally, you would expect the US to be friendly with the host countries, but that seems lost on the current administration.
What is really wrong is that it is known that russia is fighting in Ukraine with drones designed in Iran. And we have seen how hard it is for US designed weapons to deal with those drones. To the point that a lot of development is happening in Ukraine to deal with this problem.
By attacking Iran, the US has shown the world that Ukraine is the weapon supplier of choice against future drone wars.
(Once ICE cars fall below a certain percentage, they will have structural disadvantages to EVs because ICE engines are so expensive to design.)
US IC assessment is Iran is 5-10y away from delivery tech, and there's no imminent threat.
And the reason no one brings up Ukraine is because we used more interceptors in three days than were sent to Ukraine in the entire 4+ years of war.
The difference is obvious.
So while they might have incredible man power and manufacturing capability, everyone in that first battle will be seeing battle for the first time in their life.
I wouldn't jump to conclusions yet. The war is not over. I wouldn't even be so sure as to say Iran is in a good place right now.
Iran can absorb more pain than the US, but even that has a deadline. For the US, the only pain is inflation, which is more a matter of political capital than anything tangible. Trump is a lame duck president so I think he's more than happy to spend his political capital on this.
It's different for Iran. The main concern with a prolonged conflict is a lack of oil storage space. Once the tanks are full you have to cap the wells which is nigh disastrous for Iran because of the cost and difficulty of reactivating those wells later on.
To be clear, I'm not saying the US is going to come out victorious. But war is complex and it's a folly to predict any outcomes this early on.
Depends on how you connect conflicts to strategic aims. The US won the cold war. Could they have done so without all the military conflicts? Further, what's the best way to maintain a strong fighting force? By fighting. The US needs wars to maintain it's fighting muscle.
That is not correct and the comment you replied to even pointed out several ways it hurt the US other than that
Inflation is the only Immediate pain. The other harms will play out over years.
While war games already predicted we’d run out of basically all defensive and offensive weapons almost immediately in a confrontation with China, that wasn’t demonstrated yet. Now it has been proven, but not even with China, with much smaller and less powerful Iran. We used a major portion of our stuff, it didn’t accomplish anything major, and now we’re already depleted like a paper tiger.
That and its trust and geopolitical influence even among allies being quickly eroded to the benefit of countries like China.
Inflation and ammo stockpiles are easier to fix.
Yeah but all of that is orthogonal to the war itself. It's not like Trump needed to threaten to invade Greenland to go to war with Iran.
Well, European partners are looking, too - and they are drawing logical conclusions, such as producing more interceptors locally rather than wait years for the first batches of PAC-3.
https://www.ft.com/content/2e0185d1-3229-463c-8391-6dd09fe11...
Then the causal chain is War in Iran -> Oil Price increase -> Inflation & Fed Rate fears -> Treasury sell-off. Geopolitical risk creates inflation shock, and if bonds sell off on war news, their utility as a portfolio hedge weakens, and capital holders start looking for new assets (stocks and property). Also, the exodus from bonds first results in a pile of sidelined capital whose eventual rotation into stocks and property and gold leads to more market instability down the road.
Also, Russian and Iranian windfall oil profits are up along with those of Exxon, Chevron, Shell etc., the arms producers like Lockheed are booming, and for some reason, ‘prediction markets’ (gambling interests) also:
https://vestedfinance.com/blog/us-stocks/who-made-money-from...
Do you want to say, that a specific small group of people are positive about a surge in energy costs?
How does that reflect your acceptance of the overall climate change topic you are referencing?
You do not believe in it? Or do you believe in it but you do not care? Like the latest AMOC paper doesn't bother you in particular?
Am I a climate activist if i think its very bad on one side but at least pushes more people into independent reneable energy sources?
What do you think about the thing that Trump, the Clown of the USA, is directly responsible for it? Do you think Trump is a climate activist?
Even tarifs in general are not necessarily a bad idea, its a horrendes bad idea if you wiggle your thumb around, guess numbers from 0-100 and higher, let that be printed on a piece of cardboard and present it to the world as the current leader of the biggest co2 producer and military power on the whole planet affecting suddenly everyone.
You do see the issue i hope?
They did pushed for wind and solar electricity.
Consumer Price Index (CPI) vs Core CPI
The above link is a little dumb because their own graph only goes up to March. But it looks like in March Core CPI was 2.6% while CPI was 3.3%.
Still, the details are in the text:
> Excluding volatile food and energy costs, so-called consumer core prices rose 0.4% last month from March and 2.8% from April 2025
I've seen reporting that energy prices won't return to pre-war levels this calendar year, even assuming an immediate return to the status quo basically right now (which seems unlikely).
I find the whole thing really confusing. The facts I can see with my own eyes suggest high inflation and this surely means no substantial rate cuts (which... the market has expected) if not reduced consumer spending and risk of recessions.
But the markets think everything is... fine? So... what are we missing here?
and all of this to support apartheid in israel.
The US has literally never honored a deal with Iran. Iran has no reason to negotiate with the US. The US either has to back down, put boots on the ground, or sit and wait.
If the government survives, they had a quiet infrastructure investment from China they can activate to rebuild their damaged facilities.
It'll be better now, they killed the dad/wife/son/etc. of their new leader, this will 00% make them eager to negociate in good terms
The best strategy then would be to know when the retirement fund money stops doing this due to age pyramid collapse i would assume.
rdudek•1h ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/12/cpi-inflation-april-2026-.ht...
cyanydeez•51m ago
rusk•49m ago
Apocryphon•47m ago
ZeroGravitas•40m ago
Clearly he thought it was a gaffe as he denied saying it shortly after saying it twice in two videotaped appearances. But he sailed on through that and many other misteps.
BLKNSLVR•28m ago
And with every 'next thing' the US moves further from any pretext of democracy or rule of law.
pixelatedindex•32m ago
jcranmer•31m ago
That's what you call stagnating wages?
runako•25m ago
joe_mamba•49m ago
Did I get it right?
parineum•46m ago
joe_mamba•45m ago
mothballed•42m ago
There's no way to act where you won't be hated by someone. Even if you stop paying taxes for the bombs someone will scream that you hate old people or the children.
anonymars•28m ago
phainopepla2•17m ago
triceratops•18m ago
Were they wrong?
delfinom•38m ago
csoups14•24m ago
alistairSH•9m ago
If you seriously think Biden was the same as Trump (or Harris would have been worse than Trump) you need a lobotomy (as at least a refresher high school civics course).
Seriously, it was (almost) all spelled out in Project 2025. That's what the country wanted and that's what we got/are getting. I hate it, but apparently 51% of voters disagree with me.
newaccountman2•43m ago
kxkdkdisoskdnen•34m ago
ryandrake•27m ago
runako•28m ago
Which wars were started by Democratic presidents in the last half-century?
zulux•21m ago
triceratops•20m ago
KptMarchewa•16m ago
triceratops•14m ago
1. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vie...
runako•10m ago
ryeats•16m ago
runako•11m ago
IncreasePosts•14m ago
giantg2•49m ago
The other interesting part in that article is that excluding fuel and food still shows 2.8% inflation - only 1% attributable to food and fuel. Makes it seem like the main article and this article have different spins.
Edit: Wow people are jumping on this. The point is that food and fuel increases account for about 26% of the overall inflation number, meaning that the bulk of inflation is not related directly to fuel. The original article makes it it seem different.
stuaxo•48m ago
jcranmer•36m ago
HumblyTossed•44m ago
hnthrowaway0315•24m ago
giantg2•18m ago
The point was that a 1% increase in inflation due to food and fuel wasnt the end of the world. Does a 1% cost of living increase hurt? Sure, for many people on the margin of making ends meet it can be bad. For most people, $1 more out of $100 is survivable.
AnimalMuppet•38m ago
blochist•30m ago
b40d-48b2-979e•29m ago
giantg2•17m ago
pastel8739•34m ago
What do you mean by this? If adding food and fuel raises CPI by 1%, then the food and fuel prices have necessarily raised by _more_ than the combined 3.8%.
giantg2•22m ago
Pretty simple - an overall increase of 1% inflation is attributed to food and fuel.
wing-_-nuts•33m ago
ajmurmann•25m ago
triceratops•21m ago
alistairSH•15m ago
With structural disincentives to leaving (medical coverage in the US), that is almost always a less-than-inflation amount.
Do employers even call it a COL increase any more? My employer "rebranded" the annual raises as "merit increases" many years ago.