Observe the economic fallout six years later

There is no way the truth about these injuries can be permanently suppressed.

The higher gas prices are in the news and the obvious culprit is the war on Iran which has disturbed shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. But there is another factor here rarely mentioned. Refining capacity in the US never recovered from lockdowns. Before, the previous peak was 19M barrels per calendar day. That dropped in 2021 to 18.1M and further to 17.9M in 2022. We are still 0.5-0.6 million below the pre-lockdown peak, meaning that any disruption was destined to have a big effect on oil prices and prices at the pump. 

That disruption came with the Iran war. As for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, that was already tapped out during the last lockdown-driven and inflation-induced price spike. The low prices of 2025 could not last with any stress on production structures.

And speaking of inflation, that lockdown-triggered money flood from 2020-2023 ended up taking a 30-40% bite out of the dollar’s purchasing power, causing a flattening of wages and salaries in real terms, even as housing prices skyrocketed far beyond middle-class affordability. Groceries never came back to being affordable again.

Manufacturing was devastated during the Covid years with global supply-chain disruptions. Trump came to office a second time determined to fix this but chose the blunt instrument of tariffs which are higher now than in a century. The effect of these has not been to lower the trade deficit but rather increase it (the opposite of what was supposed to happen), even as manufacturing employment continues to fall.

At this point, there is no evidence that this strategy has worked in any sense, except to raise money for the federal government and provoke a Supreme Court decision that essentially restates what is already in the US Constitution. One wishes the Court would do that more often. 

Back to the Federal Reserve, EJ Antoni documents how the Fed was working to fix its balance sheet before the quantitative easing of the Covid years. It was on track to offload all its mortgage-backed security products but that progress was interrupted. Even now, the Fed’s balance sheet is a disaster to the point that the Fed is paying out $300 million in interest daily, mostly to foreign financial firms and central banks.