Big Oil and the White House Face a Pump Price Reckoning

Blaming the oil majors for spiking pump prices is mostly pointless. It is easy, however, so President Donald Trump may do so anyway as the Iran war and its oil impact segues into summer — which it almost certainly will. Big Oil can handle name-calling; it’s break-glass presidential policy options that should concern them.

Average pump prices are closing in on $4.50 a gallon. As recently as last week, Energy Secretary Chris Wright made the nervous boast to Bloomberg News that prices were still a dollar below the roughly $5 peak they hit under former President Joe Biden. In a mathematical sense, real fuel costs today still aren’t particularly high. As a share of disposable personal income, they likely reached somewhere about 2.5% in April, according to estimates from ClearView Energy Partners, lower than in prior crises.