Rely heavily on the road and feel these price increases very acutely in real time. I think only someone who does not would consider this all media hype. Let’s leave the media scapegoating to Trumpism - they do enough of it for all of us.

It’s not media hype. I have to say I find the @nyhoo reaction to be way over the top as well. I think everyone including Biden understands that this is a drop in the ocean, and the most optimistic predictions I’ve seen say maybe there will be 10 to 15 cents of relief at the pump, for like, a few weeks. And that’s at best. Crude prices actually jumped a little on the news, although it had been easing down recently. But the roughly 10% or so of our reserves, being released in coordination with a number of other countries, is not going to leave us in a lurch in some coming disaster either.

The world completely shut down for much of 2020 and as it rapidly comes back to life, all kinds of anomalies are developing, or just being exposed. Mostly time is the thing that will fix this. Maybe not in time for the dems in 2022 though. I think this is part of a coordinated geopolitical dance between oil producers and oil consumers. OPEC+ meets next week and this is partly a signal in advance of that. Some think it will backfire and OPEC+ will roll back production. That could be tricky for them too. When prices stay high for long, more non-OPEC production tends to come on line, which they don’t like.

Mostly, time is the necessary ingredient to reduce these inflation problems. I think Biden should not have rushed into that 1.9 tril stimulus back at the start of his admin. Otherwise, I don’t think his policies have had much impact on it. But he and the dems will take the blame as it persists.