We're about to make 1970s-style energy shortages great again.
Few understand the history, but it wasn't the OPEC oil embargoes that created the infamous gas lines in the 1970s. The real cause was the price controls implemented by the federal government. The artificially suppressed price led to excess consumption relative to supply, which ultimately gave rise to physical shortages.
Today, we're repeating the same mistakes, albeit with a different mechanism. The coordinated market manipulation of SPR releases Axios fake "deal" news headlines have artificially surpressed prices below the demand-destroying levels needed to ration supply.
In the absence of this natural market functioning that balances demand with increasingly thin supplies, we'll eventually hit tank bottoms across a whole range of energy products, with the same end result of economy-crippling supply shortages.
Bottom line: the inability of the Trump administration to tolerate higher prices today means supply shortages are all but guaranteed tomorrow.
We are ~9 million bbls away from hitting a storage level that's the equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck for gasoline and distillate.
Once we get there, even a minor disruption (any sort of outage) will result in gasoline lines at gas stations.
I guess we are really doing this.