And crude is soaring again so Diesel rates to jump again tomorrow.
I wonder when farmers get the message that Trump does not exactly have their interest in mind.
His big concerns at the moment are the ballroom and ducking the fallout from the Epstein files.
Energy Futures
Oil is up another $2.84 as I type, heading back towards the $90 level.
The AAA prices do not reflect this jump. So, if this sticks, we could easily see a ten cent jump in the price of diesel tomorrow.
But that’s OK.
Q: Why?
A: Trump says it’s a tiny price to pay.
Meanwhile, debt is soaring, Bessent is manipulating the bond market, and the strait is closed.
Related Posts
August 19, 2026: Debt topped $40 trillion today. But let’s discuss what really matters.
What market manipulation is next? Diesel crack spreads?
August 19, 2026: US Debt Tops $40 Trillion, the Pace Is What’s Most Alarming
Debt topped $40 trillion today. But let’s discuss what really matters.
To understand why diesel is rising much faster than the price of gasoline, please see US Diesel Crack Surpasses $100 a Barrel for the First Time, Farmers Suffer
Record high crack spreads. Serious economic ramifications.
The short answer is there is a shortage of global refining capacity. Bond manipulation sure will not fix that.
Farmers don’t need diesel anyway. Most farmers I’ve seen are overweight, they can get their daily work out by pulling the tractor themselves with a harness. More environmentaly friendly too.
i now live in a small city in the hudson valley, NY. the farmers around here have been farming the same land since the dutch empire had plantations here. i know lots of extended family and friends that have been farm families for past 300 years. gorgeous small farms with stone fences. the farmers here will vote R no matter what but they don’t give a fuck if you are gay or smoke dope. of course they are all welfare queens. but i cannot point fingers as i come from a wall street family. wall street are the biggest welfare queens in the empire. the military industry is next on that list. the farmers next. imho.
the farmers up here in northeast don’t give a fuck if some gal has an abortion either. that’s the southern, midwestern and prairie populist bible backward thumpers………..i lived in AZ and Rural CA too. those ranchers don’t give a hoot about personal choices either. much more libertarian attitudes among many rural folks in some parts of usa. not all farm regions are alike. i lived in the deep south, too. those are busy bodies and jesus freaks. cult like folks.
i sold beer and soda on the gas lines in NYC as a teenager. had cops buying beer from me when i was around 15 years old. ha ha ha. my markup was a simple teenager calculation. 10x the price i paid at the beer distributor. fun times. the
Hmm…I don’t recall who said oil prices were correcting trying to make fun of me for being long oil….but I do bookmark things…
https://mishtalk.com/economics/what-are-the-odds-trumps-executive-order-blocking-mail-in-votes-stands/
Oh it was Frosty. How do you like them diesel prices now Frosty? Hang in there buddy, Trump will find at least three more ways to screw you before he leaves office.
By the way, I’ve been taking some profits with this surge. If there’s a pull back, load up some more then sell more on the way up. Except I dont know how trump will try to jawbone oil markets now that Iran has said Strait will stay closed until Trump leaves office. 🤑
Massive welfare industry but without them we would be foragers and hunters
Mish, do you think we are close to a recession?
For most people life is hard enough, they don’t really need Mango Pedo making it 2X harder.
Mango Pedo. That is awesome. I like it even better than my Orange Julius Caesar.
Caesar was competent. Trump is more like Caligula or Elagabalus.
Thanks!
I got the Mango parts from someone else & added the Pedo part for additional accuracy.
It’s time you start a garden. It will save you some money and you will have a new hobby.
And a measure of self efficiency.
As well as improve your health
I would need an electric fence around a garden for deer and college students
In a first past the post 2 part system, there’s no way to demonstrate what a farmer cares about. Farmers have voted both dems and repubs at different times in history(as it’s the only real option). Corporate Dems and Culture War repubs do not care about farmers.
our system is corrupt to the core, and we need huge structural changes, lest we fall quicker then rome.
As the US system is much bigger than that Roman one was, the fall will be greater and will take more time.
It is virtually guaranteed that the rise and fall of the US will happen much more quickly than it did for Rome
Diesel is rocketing upward and farmers are finally vocalizing being betrayed by Trump in my area. I literally just returned from coffee with a dozen soy and corn farmers and for the first time the conversation was solidly against Trump.
This is isolated and anecdotal, but from what I witnessed this morning? WOW!
Big negative response to both Trumps war and his buddying up with North Korea.
Only a couple of supporters left that say he is playing a smart game and the rest do not know what they are talking about.
Days like today, I’m pretty quiet.
They may complain now, but they will all vote ‘R’ in November to stick to the Libs.
Probably true.
My best friend of 40 years said he still feels better not voting for Kamala because the R’s, bad as he admits they are, won’t take his guns.
Two problems with this:
– We’ve been over the “you have more than one other choice” issue. For years. And I thought he understood I wasn’t pitching D’s to him and thought he agreed with me. But, in the end, “the 2p system has me” (his words).
– The way the country is heading, he will more likely need those guns that if we miraculously elected independents.
He’s a Massie fan too.
If the R’s can keep my friends on their leash, they’re broken in. Won’t ever leave.
The minute we start hunting them for sport, they will take the guns.
Time to learn to build and fly drones. A couple 12 gauge shells in a rocket drone will get you a much better success rate than an ar15.
I am not so sure of that. The tenor of their criticisms was surprisingly sharp and consistent, with a slow and steady, but now accelerating erosion of their former reverence for Trump. One of the most vocal (former) Trump supporters called Trump a “fucking traitor” and a couple others chided him with “you voted for him”. I have been reporting that over the last year fewer and fewer of them wear their MAGA hats around town and none to church at this point.
Personally, I can’t wait for the lunch at church this Sunday afternoon. That is where I get to put my finger on the real pulse of rural farming.
all they really need to do is stay home
North Korea thanked him by launching 10 missiles. A slap for the simp, but they know he likes it.
What state? Area?
This coffee event occurred in Michigan.
Indiana is not amused by diesel price shenanigans, either. Governor extend the fuel tax suspension, as far as I was last told, but the scope of relief is in unimpactful.
The only downside to farmers getting exactly what they deserve for voting twice for orange turd is that MStanley and the like will just buy up more of them.
Two massive farming corporations with Ivy League MBAs making billions of dollars a year as CEOs on lab-grown meat and lab-grown veggies. Best thing that could ever happen to Red state America.
As a guy who grew up in a rural state, this kinda makes me sad. But MAGA deserves to take a bite of the turd sandwich they helped serve to everyone else.
I would think there are cash-rich opportunists who might move into those transport and farming spaces.
Bill Gates is already the largest private land owner in the US. He (and his billionaire cronies) will be buying a lot more farmland in the next couple of years.
Then we’ll all get to eat bugs or whatever Bill decides to feed the masses.
Weird how Epstein’s friends all end up owning the country.
And we continue to let them.
Is this worse than having subdivisions built on our best farm land?
I’m not a farmer but I wonder if they’re grateful that so much manure comes out of Washington
When I was a kid there were still barns that had mule/horse harnesses hanging on the walls.
Oh, for an analog world when there were things and places geared to interact robustly, vigorously, physically, enjoyably, with regular humans and animals.
Mish, do you have any friends that have farmed for a living?
Elections have consequences.
I have family members that farm.
They are hard-working people that pull their boots on by themselves every day alot earlier than I wake up and take them off every night after I’ve already poured myself an after-work beer.
They want others to be hard-working, conservative, ‘bootstrap’ family men like themselves and proudly vote Republican (including Trump).
They are upset with higher fuel and fertilizer prices, but don’t explicitly blame Trump. But every season, they cash their commodity price support and crop insurance checks without batting an eye (they are hard-working after all).
These family farmers remind me alot of my military uncles.
They rail against (Democrat) taxes to pay for school teachers (as their kids are already grown), but they usually post such diatribes on social media while they are waiting in a doctor’s office for their free VA medical care or resting in their barcalounger online looking for new garage toys to purchase from their monthly government pension checks.
No
I have an aunt and cousins who farm a couple thousand acres in North Dakota. I visit them once a year.
I don’t think it provides me any particular insight. The media covers farm people’s viewpoints pretty well, especially in the age of Trump.
I’ll be amazed if anything really changes. They’re usually tuned to Fox cable news 24-7, and don’t have a highly nuanced view, at least in my relatives.
Where in North Dakota?
American farmers are happy to give up their livelihoods as long as Israel can kill more Palestinian children and control more desert. Maybe they can force Jeebus to finally show back up!
When China halted purchases of American soybeans in 2017 or so, I heard on soybean farmer bleat “Trump has a plan! Trump has a plan!”
I told him that the “plan” was to bail out farmers using money borrowed from Chinese savers.
The farmer look at me like I just dropped the carcass of the Easter Bunny at his feet.
Who is JeeBus?
A fictional character out of some old books.
JeeBus Crysd
He’s the savior of the stupid.
Good Morning Farmers.
Diesel is at a rock-bottom low today; and it won’t be this cheap again until at least next summer.
You can thank President Trump for the relief!
Trump made a verbal agreement to allow Chinese tankers to dock on the Gulf coast to haul off US oil. That’ll fix it.
I was in Cal in 1974 waiting in line to get fuel for my 1962 Impala SS. 9 miles to the gallon. Odd and even days (based on plate numbers). I read College books waiting to fuel up. It was unreal weird. Fuel jumped RAPIDLY back then.
I’m 81 so those days are fresh in my mind (or what’s left of it). I was working at BLS in DC and the nation’s capital wasn’t a good place to buy gas, impatient bureaucrats were not particularly polite. I’d shop for food the day before they raised prices, that’s how fast prices were rising. I’m surprised anyone is still alive who remembers those days.
I was 10 year old kid in the mid 70s but I still remember them because my parents were dealing with it (we didn’t have fuel lines in Canada but we sure saw them on the news), especially rising food prices.
It will be another couple of decades or more before those of us who were kids in the 70s are dead or no longer able to remember.
I can vaguely remember my father sitting in a long line waiting to gas up because it was our day. Back in those days one guy would be filling your tank while another checked your oil and cleaned off your windshield.
I remember being mad that by the time I was old enough to drive there would be no gas.
I blame that Americathon movie.
I was at a north-central CA university. Ecological utopia, no car. Hiking and buses. It was a moment of bliss rarely experienced in human history. I walked in the mountains, slept out, slept around. It stands as my vision of an ideal life. Then for some odd reason I was struck to return to the big city, and law school. It was time for the Reagan era.
My car free years have been my happiest.
I was making hot-air balloons in North Carolina. Propane was relatively cheap, so we just floated over all that crap.
I remember the 70’s “Car-less Sundays” in the Netherlands… People used the highways as the widest cycle paths ever.
And the Netherlands polity learned from that experiencer. Now the Dutch have more bicycles than population
I was pumping gas in Chicago as a teen Sunoco only 260 left no matter what was in the tank
I look for the politicians to establish a strategic diesel reserve for emergencies like Trump’s war. Democrats will be outraged that this wasn’t done in anticipation of diesel price hikes and Republicans will blame Biden for his lack of foresight. Diesel prices are certain circus bait.
Gasoline has a shelf life of 3-6 months; diesel 6-12 months; heating oil 18-24 months; oil forever.
We setup a 1 mb gasoline reserve in the northeast in 2014 after Hurricane Sandy shut down all the refineries in 2012. The reserve was closed in 2024.
The short shelf life of fuels and the cost of building and maintaining storage is the reason we don’t have strategic fuel reserves for the public.
It’s not a good idea to fund a reserve when prices are high. My post was intended to be sarcasm. Our ridiculous must do pols will certainly try to make this a political issue. All these cretins can do is spend money, hence a 40 trillion national debt.
I’m blaming Biden too. How he did not foresee Trump would be elected on releasing the Epstein files, and that trump would then need to invade Iran to distract from his failure to release the Epstein files? Biden should have seen that coming and prepared for a fuel crisis accordingly.
Biden wasn’t even president after sometime in 2022 due to his dementia. Other people in his administration were making the decisions, robo-signing documents with Biden’s signature, telling Biden what to do, where to stand, using teleprompters to tell him what to say. He spent his evenings sundowning, which is why he was rarely seen later in the day and why his first debate performance was a predictable disaster.
Biden is partially responsible. He should have been grooming promoting Kamala and should have stepped down long before he did. RBG is partially responsible for the supreme court fiasco as well. Old people with huge egos