On Tuesday the White House posted, with the giddiness of a teenager who has just discovered Photoshop, that “Freedom Fuel” had opened its first station in Philadelphia, dispensing regular unleaded at $3.47 a gallon — a figure chosen, we are told, to salute the 47th president. Twenty-five stations have since bloomed across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, wrapped in stars and stripes, undercutting a national average near $3.84 and a Pennsylvania average nearer $3.99.
Freedom Fuel is a private company. The administration has committed no money, holds no stake, offers no subsidies, and operates nothing; it simply admired the merchandise and hit retweet. GasBuddy’s resident realist added that selling fuel this cheaply cannot, in the technical sense, be done at a profit, which means some private operator is torching his own margin for the cause while the government pockets the applause. The president’s flagship affordability initiative, then, is a press release about somebody else’s loss-leader.
Crude, for its part, has spent the past year behaving like a startled cat. Every few weeks Iran threatens to close the Strait of Hormuz, oil leaps, everyone publishes the identical doomsday thread, and then the strait quietly reopens and the price sags back, and we run the whole liturgy again. I have arrived at sincere metaphysical doubt. I am no longer confident the Strait of Hormuz is real. Citrini is welcome to keep the roving global-macro desk; PTT is stationing one analyst permanently on a folding chair at the mouth of the strait, binoculars raised, confirming by telegram each dawn that the waterway continues to exist. It is the only oil coverage I still trust.