The chart details the price per gallon for diesel and regular gasoline from late 2021 through Friday. The current diesel spike is a major problem given its role in freight and logistics service costs (notably in trucking), the agricultural sector, and broader array of equipment markets. It brings a cost shock that will find its way into pricing or margins as well as the health of many small businesses. The 2022 and current price spikes are radical outliers in the time series.
Considering the scale, a glaring fact of political life is that you seldom hear about the Putin energy spike from Team Trump on the Biden era inflation pain. It is no different with his Congressional flock of sheep as they pretend the massive effects of the Putin invasion did not tie directly into the US inflation pain of 2022. It is almost as if the fact had been intentionally removed as part of partisan talking points. The main goal is just to say “Biden, Biden, Biden” over and over. Trump says Putin would never have dared invade Ukraine had Trump been President but we don’t see Putin backing down since Trump’s been in office. Quite the opposite.
Like the Putin aggression of 2022, Trump’s current Iran fiasco has done a lot of damage to CPI and PPI (CPI Aug 2026: Staying Stubborn, Not Accelerating 9-11-26, PPI August 2026: Leading Indicator Signaling Struggling 9-10-26). The PPI inputs were bad this past month but CPI less so. The PPI lines are feeling the latest shock, and those inputs in theory flow into the CPI and PCE numbers for September and beyond.
The 2022 chaos had the added challenge of over-stimulated, ZIRP-driven demand on the way into March 2022 and beyond. The massive supply-demand imbalances coming out of COVID had effects like the glaring example of 40% and 30% handle used car CPI. We also saw double digit CPI in new cars (see CPI: The Big 5 Buckets and the Add-Ons 11-10-22).
Those were strange times, and Team Biden and the Fed did plenty to make it worse. The effects of supply and demand do matter. We suspect the auto dealers were not sitting around chatting about monetary aggregates in the parking lot back in March 2022.
That said, the failure of Team Trump to cite that oil and refined product spike in 2022 reeks of partisan fact and concept avoidance (hardly an isolated event in politics). The same misinformation applies today. It is safe to say that Biden did not invade Ukraine. As we head into coming weeks, the events seem to be getting worse and not better with the Houthis and Iraqi elements going after Saudi Arabian oil assets and the Bab al-Mandeb strait under siege (see UST Curve: A Brutal Week 9-12-26). That is a direct result of Trump actions.
Nobody ever lays blame on Putin in Trump World for a big slice of the 2022 inflation. Putin even got a royal welcome and red-carpet treatment in August 2025 that you seldom see. In contrast, Ukraine was chewed out in the Oval Office.
Putin could have at least said, “Sorry, my bad on the oil spike.”
