On 14 September 2026, with American diesel having crossed six dollars a gallon for the first time in history, President Trump settled the question of blame in a single sentence posted to social media: “The World’s Diesel price rise is mostly caused by the Russia/Ukraine War, not Iran.” A day earlier, at his golf resort in Doonbeg, Ireland, he had told Zelensky to “stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia,” because the strikes were “hurting the world.”
It is a tidy story, and it has one great virtue for the man telling it: it points at a war with someone else’s name on it. It is also, in its central claim, backwards. Not wholly false — the part about Ukrainian strikes is real — but backwards in the one respect that matters, the ranking of causes. The market data that Trump is implicitly citing say the opposite of what he says they say.
The tell is in the crack spread
If you want to know what is driving the price of diesel, you do not look at the price of diesel. You look at the crack spread — the margin between crude oil and the refined product made from it. That number tells …read more
Source:: Ron Paul Institute
