Peter Coy

Record low in consumer sentiment. cnbc.com/2026/04/10/con… See my Substack in the comments on why rising gas prices don't justify higher rates.

Gasoline prices jumped 21 percent in March and drove three-quarters of the CPI increase. That's not an overheating economy. It's a war shock. Raising interest rates in response would punch Americans in the face after the gas spike punched them in the stomach. My post in comments.

1/ New tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper took effect today. The escalation isn't just the headline rate — it's what changed about how they're calculated. A thread.

6/ "The first rule of holes is that when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging." Trump, in both the shooting war and the trade war, is violating that rule. See full analysis in comments.

5/ This is how tariff cascades work. Each round creates a new class of politically legitimate claimants. The complexity alone is a cost — figuring out what you owe on a partially American-sourced finished product is genuinely hard.

5/ Please go to Substack to see my full analysis, including the EIA projections and what this means for consumers.

4/ If inventories are drawn down before a deal is reached, the market faces demand destruction: prices rise until consumption physically falls to match supply. At $113/barrel, that scenario doesn't appear to be priced in.

1/ Oil is at $113 a barrel. But the more telling number is this: nearly 2 million barrels a day are now being pulled from global stockpiles just to cover the gap left by the Strait of Hormuz blockade. A thread on what that means for markets.

3/ The IEA responded with an emergency release of 400 million barrels from member reserves. Their own director called it a "sticking plaster." Iran's demands, including sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, remain far from what the U.S. and Israel will accept.

2/ In January and February, the world produced more oil than it consumed. Inventories were building. March reversed that. Production fell 6.1M barrels/day. Consumption fell only 1.4M barrels/day. The resulting 1.9M bbl/day gap is being covered by storage.

Math education is a failure. Kids learn the wrong things, and poorly. They’re barely exposed to math-related topics that they need to be well-functioning citizens. Ted Dintersmith has a lot to say about this in a new book that I just read. Link in comments.