A Recipe for Epic Disaster

On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced that he "loved" the rising inflation rate. Comments like this are what has earned Trump record negative approval ratings for his handling of the economy.

While it's nice to think that Trump's negatives, and the fact that he's even underwater with Republicans. might be the death knell for the lickspittle Congress, there is a problem with those inflation numbers. That problem? They may be going higher. Much higher.

The damage done by the unnecessary war on Iran has barely begun to be felt, with multiple factors shielding consumers from much of the cost so far. Even if Trump's latest claim that the war is about to end turns out to be accurate, recovery will be measured in months, if not years. Meanwhile, the tariffs are still out there, gradually bleeding into every aspect of the system, while cuts in government programs are eating into the savings of millions.

In fact, Trump has planted so many bombs in the American economy, it's going to take a miracle if one of them doesn't explode.

Take one part food

The average consumer in the United States spends about 10% of their income on food. That's not so bad when you consider that in many nations, the number is 50% or higher.

It's also not great, considering that in 2020 that number was 8%. People can feel the difference.

For decades, the U.S. has lived in an era of extreme abundance and relatively stable food availability and cost. However, that there are signs that the end of that era may be at hand.

• A massive El Niño threatens to produce more extreme weather, like the terrifying outbreak of tornadoes that swept across the Midwest on Thursday.
  "Meteorologists forecast it will rival—or exceed—a record El Nino that began in 1997 and helped trigger billions of dollars in damage from heat waves, floods, droughts, tornadoes and wildfires."
• Following a record "snow drought" over the winter, the snowpack in the Western States is at record lows.
  "Conditions are particularly concerning in the Colorado River Basin, a critical water source for the Southwest—parts of which have had an exceptionally dry winter in addition to record warmth."
• The screwworm outbreak means fewer animals coming to market at a time when the number of cattle in the United States is already at a 75 year low.
  "Beef prices already surged to $7 a pound in April. That's a 21% increase from last year and a 75% increase since 2020."
• Farmers around the world, including in the United States, are short of the fertilizer they need.
  "There's very little slack in the fertilizer supply chain. The product doesn't store well, some of it is prone to blowing up, some if it gets clumpy and hard to use with the slightest moisture. ... Iran was a top urea producer and exporter before the war. It's unclear when or if that capacity will come back online."
• USAID has been dismantled, destroying programs that didn't just help other nations.
  "For decades, foreign aid programs have served as a critical market for American agricultural products. In 2023 alone, USAID purchased over one million metric tons of food from U.S. producers, stabilizing domestic commodity prices and supporting farm incomes."

Add a big dash of oil

It doesn't take much observation to see how oil prices have reacted to Trump's decision to attack Iran, or how sensitive they are to the prospect of reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

But before Trump's latest promises gets you to sign that order for a three-row SUV, understand that, even if this time doesn't turn out to be another false alarm, the end of the war doesn't mean the end of the oil crisis. As Oil Price explains, the real effects of this conflict have not yet been felt.

In the coming weeks, readers will increasingly see two rarely used phrases in stories covering our dwindling worldwide oil inventories: "operational minimum" and "tank bottoms." ... They signify rapid depletion of existing oil inventories and presage price spikes to come due to the loss of oil supplies from the Persian Gulf because of Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the maritime artery through which 20 percent of the world's oil previously flowed.

If that artery is opened again, does everything go back to normal?

An agreement to end the Iran war within the next few days would not change the outcome because it would take at least three months to normalize traffic through the Strait of Hormuz under the absolute best of circumstances.

What are we going to get instead? A system that will hit "operational stress" sometime around the end of this month, resulting in extreme price volatility and a supply chain that's perilously close to collapse.

The analysis points out that "jawboning" by Trump, with a promise of resolution every time the markets got antsy, has kept U.S. crude prices largely stable throughout the war. However, as JP Morgan warned last month, the prices consumers have seen so far have been buffered by a rapid drawdown of both commercial and government reserves. That includes a "coordinated 2.5 million barrel-per-day release from the strategic petroleum reserves of the U.S., Japan, and South Korea."

That capacity is not endless. Every day that the Strait remains closed brings the system nearer to chaos. And even when it opens, many of the ports, refineries, and processing facilities in the area will remain off line for months or years.

If Trump's current claims about reopening the Strait of Hormuz fizzle again, or turn out to be something less than a full opening, the timeline to economic disaster will be running out fast.

Season with Helium

Helium was probably not at the top of your list of global concerns. But there's a lot more to this gas than floating party balloons and making your voice squeaky.

Helium is the only element capable of keeping the superconducting magnets in MRI machines cold enough to function. Without it, many forms of detailed medical imaging go away. Diseases go undiagnosed, or misdiagnosed. Surgeries simply don't happen.

Neither do computer chips. Manufacturing the latest generation of chips requires lasers that operate with extreme precision. They can only etch out silicon wafers accurately when used in an atmosphere of pure helium. Without it, the assembly lines for computers, phones, and most other electronics grinds to a halt.

Divers use helium when working at great depths. Rockets need helium to pressurize their tanks. High speed fiber optics requires helium. So does advanced research in everything from quantum computing to astronomy.

Helium. It's a lot more useful than you probably thought.

Now, guess where about a third of the world's helium is sourced. If you picked the Middle East, and particularly facilities that operate through the Strait of Hormuz, you got it in one.

Trump's war on Iran has already created a global helium shortage. Right now, medical uses of helium are getting first dibs on the limited supply, but the situation is increasingly tight. Major suppliers are informing customers that they can no longer meet their contracts. Spot prices are up 40% to 100%.

Even if the Strait is reopened promptly ... it won't help much.

The damage didn’t stop at the strait. Iranian missile strikes on March 18 and 19, 2026 damaged the Pearl GTL facility at Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, a gas-to-liquids plant where helium is produced as a byproduct. The outage is expected to take roughly 310 million cubic feet of annual helium production offline.

The shortage is expected to persist for at least three years. Possibly longer. This places more reliance on sources in the United States that together provide about 40% of the world's supply. Helium is already in a "stressed" position. Prices can be expected to fluctuate broadly, and should either of the two large sources in the United States go down, the economic (and health) effects could be staggering.

Place in a pressure cooker

On Thursday, the World Bank cut its economic forecast for the coming year. A big part of that is how the Trump / Netanyahu war on Iran has triggered instability in both oil prices and fertilizer availability.

Average fertiliser prices are expected to jump by as much as 38% this year, as a result of disruption of supplies through the strait, and shortages of the inputs for fertiliser production from the Gulf.

The numbers that Americans have been seeing for monthly inflation may look scary, but they're not a patch on what we will see if the cost of this war comes home—of it continued instability leads to the kind of supply chain failures seen during the pandemic.

Even if we avoid a major economic downturn, the prices for oil, fertilizer, and Trump's tariffs, means that food prices and availability are very likely to be an increasing concern.

Many people are wealthy enough to weather a sharp increase in food prices. It may be irritating to the wealthy when the price of eggs goes up, but way back in 1857, German mathematician Ernst Engel pointed out that the amount spent on food, while not perfectly fixed, tends to stay about the same even as personal income rises. Poor household may spend half of their income keeping everyone fed, but for the wealthy, food becomes something of a budgetary afterthought, even if they indulge.

For decades, American consumers have enjoyed food prices that were not just low, but steadily declining as a percentage of their overall spending due to the overwhelming agricultural production of U.S. farmers and easy import of food from other nations. Both of these things are facing barriers.

The clock is ticking. Even if this time the promise to end this unnecessary and illegal war turns to be real, it will keep on ticking. Whether we can get things back on track before time runs out is an open question.