SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
goldman sachs
'Absolutely Massive' Price Shocks Coming as Trump's Iran War Drives Up Gas, Diesel Prices
"What should really terrify Republicans is... the futures price on wholesale gasoline," said economist Paul Krugman.
Mar 04, 2026
President Donald Trump's unprovoked attack on Iran has sent oil prices surging, and it's already hurting Americans at the gas pump.
Petroleum industry analyst Patrick De Haan reported on Wednesday that the average US price for diesel has hit $4 per gallon, the highest it's been since April 2024.
De Haan also projected that the price of diesel would keep rising in the coming days before eventually reaching a price in the range of $4.25 to $4.45 per gallon.
The average price of gasoline is now approaching $3.20 per gallon, De Haan reported, and is projected to rise to at least $3.30 per gallon in the coming days. According to data from the US Energy Information Administration, average US gas prices haven't been that high since September 2024.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman on Wednesday flagged data showing that the price of Reformulated Blendstock for Oxygenate Blending (RBOB) gasoline futures contracts has been going through the roof since the start of the Iran war.
"What should really terrify Republicans is RBOB—the futures price on wholesale gasoline," Krugman commented. "This is up 75 cents a gallon since its low earlier this year."
According to a Wednesday report at Market Watch, researchers at the investment bank Goldman Sachs this week raised their price forecast for Brent crude oil for the second quarter of 2026 to $76 per barrel, an increase of $10.
What's more, Market Watch noted, Goldman is projecting that the price of Brent crude could hit $100 per barrel if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for the next five weeks due to the war.
Goldman isn't the only investment bank projecting sky-high oil prices if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed for a prolonged period, as JPMorgan Chase earlier this week projected that the price of Brent crude could top $120 if the Iran conflict drags on, according to a Monday report from Market Watch.
Robert Brooks, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Global Economy and Development program, said in an interview with Seeking Alpha that global investors at the moment seem to be underestimating the economic risks of a prolonged conflict with Iran, citing "a weird tendency in markets to downplay unexpected shocks when they happen.”
However, Brooks told Seeking Alpha that what's happening with the global oil market right now "is absolutely massive" and should not be ignored.
Trump so far has not outlined any end game for the war he started, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday boasted that the Trump administration was "playing for keeps" by delivering "death and destruction from the sky all day" on Iran.
Keep ReadingShow Less
US Consumers Paying the Most for Tariffs: Wall Street Giant’s Report Exposes Trump Lies
The report from investment bank Goldman Sachs comes as President Donald Trump is piling up even more tariffs on imported goods.
Oct 14, 2025
New research from investment bank Goldman Sachs affirms, as progressive advocates and economists warned, that US consumers are bearing the brunt of President Donald Trump's trade wars.
As reported by Bloomberg on Monday, economists at Goldman released an analysis this week estimating that US consumers are shouldering up to 55% of the costs stemming from Trump's tariffs, even though the president has repeatedly made false claims that the tariffs on imports exclusively tax foreigners.
Goldman's research also found that US businesses will pay 22% of the cost of the tariffs, while foreign exporters will pay just 18% of the cost. Additionally, Goldman economists estimate that Trump's tariffs "have raised core personal consumption expenditure prices by 0.44% so far this year, and will push up the closely watched inflation reading to 3% by December," according to Bloomberg.
Despite all evidence that US consumers are shouldering the costs of the tariffs, the Trump administration has continued to insist that they are exclusively being paid by foreign countries.
During a segment on NBC's "Meet the Press" last month, host Kristen Welker cited an earlier Goldman estimate that 86% of the president's tariffs were being paid by US businesses and consumers, and then asked US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent if he accepted that the tariffs were taxes on Americans.
"No, I don't," Bessent replied.
“Goldman Sachs says 86% of the tariffs have been paid by American businesses & consumers. Do you acknowledge that these tariffs are a tax on Americans?” - NBC
“No I don't.” - Scott Bessent
pic.twitter.com/6wtAznhpCc
— Spencer Hakimian (@SpencerHakimian) September 7, 2025
As Common Dreams reported in August, executives such as Walmart CEO Doug McMillon have explicitly told shareholders that while they are able to absorb the cost of tariffs, Trump's policy would still "result in higher prices" for customers.
Goldman's report comes as Trump is piling up even more tariffs on imported goods that will ultimately be paid by US consumers as companies raise prices.
According to The New York Times, tariffs on a wide range of products including lumber, furniture, and kitchen cabinets went into effect on Tuesday, and the Trump administration has also "started imposing fees on Chinese-owned ships docking in American ports."
The administration has claimed that the tariffs on lumber are necessary for national security purposes, although some experts are scoffing at this rationale.
Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, told the Times that the administration's justification for the lumber tariffs are "absurd."
"If war broke out tomorrow, there would be zero concern about American ‘dependence’ on foreign lumber or furniture, and domestic sources would be quickly and easily acquired," he said.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Red Flag': Analysts Sound Major Alarms As AI Bubble Now 'Bigger' Than Subprime
"I wouldn't touch this stuff now," warned one financial analyst about the AI industry.
Oct 03, 2025
Several analysts are sounding alarms about the artificial intelligence industry being a major financial bubble that could potentially tip the global economy into a severe recession.
MarketWatch reported on Friday that the MacroStrategy Partnership, an independent research firm, has published a new note claiming that the bubble generated by AI is now 17 times larger than the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, and four times bigger than the global real-estate bubble that crashed the economy in 2008.
The note was written by a team of analysts, including Julien Garran, who previously led the commodities strategy team at multinational investment bank UBS.
Garran contends that companies have vastly overhyped the capabilities of AI large language models (LLMs), and he pointed to data showing that the adoption rate of LLMs among large businesses has already started to decline. He also thinks that flagship LLM ChatGPT may have "hit a wall" with its latest release, which he said hasn't delivered noticeably better performance than previous releases, despite costing 10 times as much.
The consequences for the economy, he warns, could be dire.
"The danger is not only that this pushes us into a zone 4 deflationary bust on our investment clock, but that it also makes it hard for the Fed and the Trump administration to stimulate the economy out of it," he writes in the investment note.
Garran isn't the only analyst expressing extreme anxiety about the potential for an AI bubble to bring down the economy.
In a Friday interview with Axios, Dario Perkins, managing director of global macro at TS Lombard, said that tech companies are increasingly taking on massive debts in their race to build out AI data centers in a way that is reminiscent of the debts held by companies during the dot-com and subprime mortgage bubbles.
Perkins told Axios that he's particularly wary because the big tech companies are claiming "they don't care whether the investment has any return, because they're in a race."
"Surely that in itself is a red flag," he added.
CNBC reported on Friday that Goldman Sachs SEO David Solomon told an audience at the Italian Tech Week conference that he expected a "drawdown" in the stock market over the next year or two given that so much money has been pumped into AI ventures in such a short time.
"I think that there will be a lot of capital that’s deployed that will turn out to not deliver returns, and when that happens, people won’t feel good," he said.
Solomon wouldn't go so far as to definitively declare AI to be a bubble, but he did say some investors are "out on the risk curve because they’re excited," which is a telltale sign of a financial bubble.
According to CNBC, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who was also attending Italian Tech Week, said on Friday that there was a bubble in the AI industry, although he insisted that the technology would be a major benefit for humanity.
"Investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas," Bezos said of the AI industry. "And that’s also probably happening today."
Perkins made no predictions about when the AI bubble will pop, but he argued that it's definitely much closer to the end of the cycle than the beginning.
"I wouldn't touch this stuff now," he told Axios. "We're much closer to 2000 than 1995."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular