Oil Expert EXPOSES Why WW3 Is Coming.. (Calvinfroedge)
Calvin Froedge’s core trade is that peace headlines cannot reverse physical damage already embedded in energy and shipping infrastructure. He cited strikes on pipelines, refineries, storage tanks, Fujairah and a 260,000-barrel-a-day Bahrain refinery, alongside sharply curtailed Gulf production. Even if hostilities stopped immediately, “you see disruptions for months.”
Froedge views oil below $100 as a financial-market signal divorced from the physical market. After discussion of an SPR release and Treasury consideration of shorting crude futures, he questioned whether price discovery remained free: “They’re pulling out all the stops” while real-world consequences persist. His binary is blunt: “Either prices or shortages, pick one.”
The scale of the claimed supply loss makes historical oil shocks look like weak comparisons. Froedge contrasted COVID—when roughly a 10% demand decline helped send oil negative—with the hypothetical of a 20% supply drop, and recalled oil rising from about $2 to $40 during the 1970s despite barrels largely being redirected rather than destroyed. “We don’t have anything of this scale.”
The second-order trade extends far beyond crude into natural gas, fertilizer, chemicals, aluminum, food and AI infrastructure. Froedge said up to 50% of the ammonia and ammonium-nitrate fertilizer market could be offline, while costlier energy would further damage already-questionable data-center economics. His framing: “Energy is the first part of almost every single commercial value chain.”
Suppressing oil prices would not eliminate inflation; it would relocate the stress into shortages, rationing and underinvestment. A government-imposed ceiling would discourage drilling, acreage purchases and capex precisely when new supply is needed. If that continues, Froedge’s endpoint is a “wartime economy” in which governments allocate fuel, restrict consumption and potentially nationalize assets.
The macro backdrop is materially worse than during the last stagflationary shock. Froedge contrasted US debt at roughly 30% of GDP in the 1970s with 130% now, noting that if rates returned to 22% mortgage levels, interest payments could consume about one-sixth of the budget. The host then linked that scenario to money printing and an “Argentina doom loop.”
Froedge conceded the thesis can fail if genuine peace emerges, and he paired conviction with unusually explicit risk limits. His preferred evidence is corporate behavior—flight suspensions, AIS shipping data, force-majeure notices and rig shutdown disclosures—not political headlines or viral missile charts. Despite “betting big” and losing roughly $50,000 that day, his closing rule was: “Don’t ever go too heavy on a single thing that’ll take you down… live to fight another day.”
1. The peace narrative collides with continuing physical attacks
Froedge arrived after one of his worst trading days in years but held to his post: authorities were trying to “undo the consequences of what they did in the financial markets,” while none had been unwound physically. His posture was explicit: “I’m betting big. If I’m wrong, I’m going to cash in calling it a year.”
His geopolitical premise was about incentives: after the US and Israel allegedly attacked during negotiations and, in his account, killed Khamenei and his family, why would Iran’s new leadership trust another negotiation? “We basically betrayed any notion of good-faith diplomacy… twice now.”
The host pressed him on viral charts suggesting Iranian missile launches had fallen to zero. Froedge countered with reports of ongoing strikes, visible missiles, four destroyed THAAD batteries and 17 attacks on Dubai in one day, arguing that “words are one thing and actions are completely different.”
2. Damage already done could constrain supply for months
Froedge’s production snapshot was stark: Kuwait producing no oil, Iraq almost none, and Saudi Arabia down significantly while rerouting only about 25% of normal capacity through a Red Sea pipeline. Meanwhile, Hormuz might be described as open, but “there are almost no transits.”
The repair clock matters more than a cease-fire headline. Ras Tanura had been hit, while Qatar’s Ras Laffan—described by Froedge as providing 20% of global natural gas—was under force majeure; he said restarting would require two weeks, followed by another two weeks to regain full production.
He described current disruption as roughly 75%, spanning oil, natural gas, fertilizer and aluminum. Fujairah, the world’s third-largest bunkering port in his telling, had also been struck: while politicians declared victory, shipowners were asking, “Where the hell am I going to get fuel for this ship?”
The historical analogy underscored his disbelief at sub-$100 oil. COVID sent crude negative after demand fell roughly 10%; the 1970s took oil from about $2 to $40 without a comparable physical loss. “What do you think it can do if supply drops 20%?”
3. Price suppression converts inflation into scarcity
Froedge questioned whether crude futures still reflected buyers and sellers, citing an SPR release and reports that the Treasury had considered directly shorting crude. The host challenged his broader suspicion—“You really think Cramer’s compromised?”—but Froedge characterized Cramer as “an agent of misinformation and manipulation.”
He was careful not to claim government shorting had occurred: “I don’t know.” His hypothetical mechanism was selling front-month contracts with money created for the purpose, followed by special cash-settlement rules rather than physical delivery—an intervention he called “Soviet-level.”
His economic binary was categorical: accept higher prices or impose shortages. Holding oil near $90 would weaken incentives to drill, acquire acreage or upgrade capacity; rationing would then determine “you can use gas, you can’t use gas,” ultimately producing centralized resource management rather than a market response.
4. The shock travels through fertilizer, food and AI
Froedge challenged the AI-investment narrative at its physical foundation: “AI is energy turned into something useful.” Data centers need energy, including natural gas, and Middle Eastern Amazon facilities had reportedly been affected; if energy costs go parabolic, those data centers become “even less economic than they already were.”
Fertilizer was the sharper downstream risk. Froedge said about 50% of global fertilizer either comes from the Middle East or depends on its energy and feedstocks, with up to 50% of the ammonia and ammonium-nitrate fertilizer market potentially offline before some countries’ spring planting.
That is why his focus centers on shipping, refineries, oil, chemicals, mining and platinum-group metals—the capital-intensive “old economy” assets markets pretend do not exist. Shipping, in particular, reveals where commodities are flowing, how they are moving and how they are priced.
5. The endgame is stagflation—or genuine peace
Froedge mapped the setup onto the 1970s: potential inflation alongside AI-related job losses, but with US debt-to-GDP now around 130% versus roughly 30% then. He noted that at 1982-style mortgage rates of 22%, interest payments would consume about one-sixth of the US budget. The host then said interest could become the only thing affordable without printing more money, invoking an Argentina-style doom loop.
The host asked the essential counterfactual: “Is there a third option where you are just wrong?” Froedge conceded that “anything’s possible”; if peace genuinely breaks out, energy prices should gradually normalize. He nevertheless called market expectations for oil back in the $50s by September “extremely optimistic.”
His source-of-truth hierarchy begins with corporate actions: suspended flights, AIS traffic, force majeure and operating shutdowns. Borr Drilling’s disclosure that attacks forced three jackup rigs offline mattered to him more than official denials that any rigs were hit.
Froedge acknowledged his own confirmation risk—“Sometimes I want to believe something’s true and it’s not true”—and recommended following specialists who rarely become alarmed. Yet conviction did not override survival: “Don’t take degenerate risks that you can’t afford… the most important thing in markets and in life is, like, live to fight another day.”
Full transcript
Mr. Calvin, welcome to the stream, my friend. It’s an absolute pleasure to meet you. How are you?
Same to you. To be honest, it was a volatile trading day. Probably one of my worst days in a few years.
First of all, I’m sorry to hear that. I was following, obviously, everything that’s happening today, and I wasn’t sure if you were going to still make it on the stream, but you did conclude with an incredible tweet that I’m going to read back to you, and I kind of want you to start here.
Your tweet reads: “They’re pulling out all the stops to undo the consequences of what they did in the financial markets, but none of the consequences have been unwound in the real world. I don’t think this sticks. I’m betting big. If I’m wrong, I’m going to cash in calling it a year.”
Basically, the way this started is, they’re doing these negotiations with the Iranians, and it’s Wyckoff and Kushner, who’s basically Trump’s real estate buddy and Trump’s son-in-law. What are their credentials to represent the United States in diplomatic negotiations? I don’t think that they have any other than being close to Trump and being aligned with a certain other foreign country.
But anyway, they’re the guys. Khamenei’s in his house, and these other guys are sitting down to discuss the proposals and where they’re going next in negotiations. The United States basically just blows everybody up along with Israel, preemptively, which doesn’t seem very diplomatic.
Then Khamenei’s son has now taken over as the supreme leader of Iran. So we basically just killed the guy’s whole family, and now our expectation is that this guy is going to play along because Trump doesn’t like seeing oil up 30% overnight. It seems kind of ridiculous.
Look, if we can turn the Iranian skyline in Tehran into acid black rain, and the Iranians aren’t going to fight us over that, then I don’t know about the world. I’ll just take a break for the rest of the year.
But I look at infrastructure, I look at shipping, I look at the oil markets, and what I’m saying is that you’ve basically already had a lot of disruption in the real world. You’ve had pipelines blown up, refineries blown up, and storage tanks blown up.
Just this morning, Fujairah, which is the third-largest bunkering port in the world—meaning that’s where they load ships with fuel and refined product to carry the products around—got hit this morning. So while Trump’s saying it’s all over and we won, the shipping guys are like, “Where the hell am I going to get fuel for this ship?”
The narrative is that the Strait of Hormuz is open, but the reality is there are almost no transits. Then I see everybody sharing these fake charts on how many ballistic missiles Iran is launching, and I’m talking to guys I know in Dubai. They’re like, “I can see the missiles. They’ve launched more missiles at us today than they say they launched in total on that chart.”
To me, this thing happened that was really consequential, and maybe their expectation was, “Okay, well, we kill everybody, they’re just going to roll over, and they’re just going to accept that we’re the greatest and that we’ll kill them all if they don’t just do what we want.”
But they didn’t do that. They started blowing up all this stuff that’s really important to the world economy: fertilizer, oil, chemicals, and fuels. These things are really important. Our civilization comes to a halt without those things.
They blew those things up, and they can keep blowing those things up. What is the incentive for a guy who just had his entire family murdered to negotiate? Why would you?
This is the second time we’ve done this. We did this in the 12-day war, and we did this this time around. We basically betrayed any notion of good-faith diplomacy twice now. Why would they negotiate with us?
You’ve been tweeting a lot about the incorrect missile charts as well, and I found it so difficult to decipher what is actually real and fake on Twitter. We’re sort of on the bleeding edge. News is coming in. What’s a real headline, and what’s a fake headline?
There are these charts going around showing the trajectory of Iranian missiles, and it’s basically gone into this downward slope to zero. The claim in these charts that are floating around right now is that the Iranians have not launched any missiles for days.
There are cluster warheads falling in Tel Aviv right now. The United States has 8 to 10 THAAD batteries in the world. These are long-range radar and interception systems for ballistic missiles. Four of them were destroyed in the Middle East in the past week.
I’m seeing updates all day long about refineries being struck, oil storage being struck, pipelines being struck, failed attacks, intercepted attacks, and stuff falling in the ocean. A guy from the UAE said, “Look, there were 17 ballistic missile attacks on Dubai just today.”
The chart that everybody’s citing says that there weren’t any attacks launched at all today. I don’t sympathize with the Iranian cause beyond this: if somebody was in my country blowing up schools and turning the capital city into acid rain, that seems pretty terrible to me, right? So it’s this disconnect from reality where words are one thing and actions are completely different.
The actions that the United States has committed so far are disastrous for the global economy. I mean, even just what has been done already. I’m not talking about what will be done or what people are afraid could be done, but what has already happened.
We’re talking about Kuwait right now, which is one of the leading members of OPEC and is producing no oil. Iraq, another leading member of OPEC, is producing almost no oil. Saudi Arabia’s production is down significantly. They’re sending what they can to the Red Sea via a pipeline, but that’s only about 25% of what their normal production capacity would be.
Yeah.
These are, other than the United States and Russia, the largest oil-producing countries in the world, and their production is effectively not only shut in but shut down right now.
If the Strait opened tomorrow, it would still take months to repair some of the damage that’s already been done. That’s the disconnect.
Trump wants cheap oil. Trump wants everything. He wants it to be free. He wants markets to be high, and he wants to be able to kill whoever he wants and bomb whoever he wants with no consequences.
Look, man, I voted for Trump. He was like, “I’m going to stop the wars.” We’re going to investigate the Epstein files. It turns out he and his cabinet were basically the Epstein file MVPs. So that’s where we’re at.
Because you’re obviously super deep on the nuances of oil and shipping and how these industries work, can you explain to me why, or how, there is such a disconnect between the infrastructure side and the damage that’s already been done versus Trump being able to come out, pop open a couple of headlines, and then oil is back well below $100 at the snap of a finger?
How can those two things be so different?
I think the answer to that question is that we have manipulated markets. Trump ran a casino early in his career. I think he’s running a casino now. I don’t think that they’re real. Maybe Brent is more real, but I think they’re pulling out all the stops.
They had Jim Cramer say there was no chance for peace last night. Then they talked about releasing oil from the SPR. They were talking last Thursday about the Treasury directly shorting crude futures.
Yeah, that’s true.
When you think about it, that’s absolutely insane. That’s Soviet-level intervention in markets. You might as well not have markets at that point. That was a ridiculous headline.
The disconnect is basically just that the headlines don’t reflect reality. Trump can say whatever he wants, but the Iranians have a say in that as well.
If Trump stops bombing, I think that’s what the Iranians said is their first condition for stopping aggression. But in the last hour before we started talking, after Trump’s headlines, the Iranians hit another refinery in Bahrain—260,000 barrels a day.
By the way, this is a complete side note, but do you really think Cramer’s compromised? Come on. He’s become this meme where people do the opposite of everything he says. It’s almost become a Pavlovian-type reaction. You whistle and the dog comes.
They know what they’re doing. He is an agent of misinformation and manipulation.
You think the Saudis and the Emiratis are still going to put trillions of dollars into data centers after their economies just got obliterated?
This is actually a very interesting perspective.
Yeah, we didn't even get here: the impact on AI infrastructure buildout and Middle East activity in U.S. markets. Does that change after what's just happened?
Well, look, what is AI? AI is energy turned into something useful: software and computing infrastructure.
Yes. Okay?
You need energy for that. What's the main source of energy in the world? Oil. What's number 2? Natural gas. You need natural gas to run the data centers.
Uh-huh.
By the way, they hit data centers in the Middle East—Amazon data centers. Amazon put out press releases about their data centers being impacted. You might have seen that.
Uh-huh.
Okay? So even in the Middle East, they're hitting the data centers. All of these data centers around the world require energy. Guess what happens if the cost of energy goes parabolic? Those data centers become even less economic than they already were.
I mean, OpenAI was already the white whale for Microsoft. It's already losing tons of money. We're supposed to believe that our entire economy hinges on this huge AI investment and somehow this is going to bring us to the promised land, but we have no idea how we're going to deal with all the people who are unemployed now, or how we're going to deal with all of the people who are on fixed incomes. Who's going to pay the income tax that's supporting those people on Social Security? How are you going to pay for the inflation increases in Social Security? It's like AI's the answer. AI requires a lot of energy, so energy has to be cheap. But we don't know what all these people who aren't in the economy anymore are going to do. The whole thing is just logically inconsistent.
Yeah, it's a very interesting take. Going back to some of the oil stuff, say hypothetically Iran were to come out today and say, “All right, we're done. Ceasefire. The Strait is opened back up.” How severe is the supply-constraint bottleneck that's already been caused in oil transportation?
I think that you see disruptions for months.
Wow.
No, right now, to be clear, the disruption is, let's say, anywhere from 75%.
Wow.
The disruption is on oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and aluminum. Aluminum is really important for the data centers as well. So that's the disruption right now.
If everything went back to normal tomorrow, Ras Tanura, the largest refinery in the Middle East, got hit. There are repairs that need to be done at Ras Tanura. Ras Laffan, which provides 20% of the world's natural gas from Qatar, has already undergone force majeure. They've already shut down. They require 2 weeks after the restart process starts to even get back to production, and then it's another 2 weeks after that to get back to full production.
So look, a lot of these impacts have already happened. It's not theoretical. It's not like, “Oh, it's going to be really bad if the Strait's not unblocked.” It is really bad. Stuff did blow up—a lot of important stuff.
So why was oil able to get back below $100 so aggressively? Is the market just praying for good news to get bailed out on? Theoretically, this can't hold. If you're right—
Like I said, I'm not sure it's a free market. I mean, this is how a free market works versus gray markets or black markets. In a free market, prices are set by the market, by buyers and sellers, and the buyers and sellers are all market participants.
Yes. Okay?
A gray market is basically when things get a little trickier, and you start having these other participants, like the government. I mean, is the government shorting oil futures? I don't know. They said last week that they were considering it.
Right?
So you can pick one of two things when you have supply shortages: higher prices or shortages. If they don't want to have higher prices, then they're going to have shortages. Because what happens next? Let's say 20 million barrels a day is offline in the global market. Half of the Korean chemical industry already declared force majeure or said they were going to declare force majeure in the next week.
That means that they're basically saying, “Our supply chain is broken. We can't produce our products anymore. We're sorry. We have to break our contracts. We're done.” It's almost like declaring bankruptcy, but on a contract.
So basically, if we look at all of the countries that are reliant on the Strait of Hormuz—Japan, Korea, Bangladesh, India—the U.K. only has 2 days of natural gas without imports. The global energy situation is really precarious.
In 2022, when Russia-Ukraine happened, the increases in prices caused riots and shortages all over the developing world. In Sri Lanka, the government basically collapsed. People starved. In Haiti, you had literal cannibalism. In Pakistan, you had shortages and deaths. People couldn't cook food because of cooking-gas shortages.
These are not theoretical impacts. These are things that we've observed and that have actually happened just from prices spiking. Now, when you get actual shortages, that means that product has to go from one place to another. If there's no free market to set those prices, then either people are just going to have to go without, or usage is going to have to be rationed—which means the government deciding, “Okay, you can use gas, you can't use gas. You can drive a car, you can't drive a car.”
If you don't have a free market, then that means you need central authoritarian management of resources and fuel consumption. If we're not going to have free-market pricing for energy products, which, look, every single person that I follow in energy—and I've been specializing in energy and shipping for about 8 years—I follow people who have been in this for decades, and their reaction the entire time was, “Oil is up $30 a barrel from the lows. This is actually a massive underreaction to Hormuz being closed.”
Damn.
I think if you look at the 1970s, the 1970s was the Arab oil embargo. During the Arab oil embargo, that was basically the Persian Gulf countries—the Middle Eastern countries—saying, “We don't want to sell to the West anymore. We're going to sell more to the East.” The oil didn't really leave the market; the market lost production capacity.
There were other instances, like the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, where the market lost a few million barrels a day of production. At the time, consumption was a bit lower than it is now, so you're talking about a single-digit percentage of production.
In the 1970s, when some of this stuff happened, the price of oil went from around $2 a barrel up to around $40.
Jesus.
So it was like a 20× increase. This was during a time period when the only thing that happened was that the West lost political control of the oil market. They didn't actually lose barrels. What we're seeing now—an actual, substantial loss of production—we've never seen that.
Yeah. Yeah, right. Exactly. I mean, think about COVID. The oil price went negative because demand fell about 10%.
Yep. So if the oil price can go negative because demand falls 10%, what do you think it can do if supply drops 20%? We've never seen this. We don't really have a past scenario to base it on.
Well, we can say that after the Iranian Revolution—I believe in 1980, and I'm doing all this from memory—it was like a 3×, or a 300% increase in oil.
No, you know, I won't quote you on it.
I believe in 1980 it was like a 3×, a 300% increase in oil. But we don't have anything of this scale. With Russia-Ukraine, it was like, “There have been some sanctions. Russia might have problems getting spare parts. Theoretically, there could be some impacts at some point in the future.” The market got so worried about that—
That oil went higher than it just went now, right?
I think it peaked out at around $140. It spiked up intraday or something. So oil went higher than it is now, and that was with no production loss.
Right now, we've got this situation where we actually lost production. If you look at the entire value chain, people use oil and natural gas as energy sources and feedstocks to create other things.
For example, fertilizer: 50% of the world's fertilizer either comes from the Middle East or is derived from feedstock or energy from the Middle East. The estimate right now is that up to 50% of the entire ammonia and ammonium nitrate fertilizer market could be offline. There are already reports that certain countries won't have enough fertilizer for their spring planting.
And this just happened, right? I mean, if you take 50% of fertilizer out of the market, civilization has a couple of essential building blocks: energy, fertilizer, concrete, and steel. Those are the—yeah, those are the—that’s Vaclav Smil’s *How the World Really Works*. That’s a great book if any of your listeners want to read it.
Energy is the primary input for all the rest of those. It takes a lot of energy to make steel, concrete, and fertilizer. Energy is the first part of almost every single commercial value chain. So, you take energy out, make it more expensive, make it rare, and you get problems.
Even if they say, “Okay, we’re just not going to let oil go above $90. $90 is the cap. If oil goes above $90, we’re just going to short oil. We’re going to make sure it never goes above $90,” what does that mean? It means companies that might otherwise be incentivized to invest in that value chain aren’t going to drill that well or buy that new acreage. They’re not going to do those capex upgrades because if the government has already gone socialist here, who knows what they’re going to do next? Maybe they’ll get nationalized. Maybe their production will get nationalized.
People start getting really wary as soon as you have these government interventions. That’s really the precarious position Trump is putting us in by being so interventionist: it inhibits the ability of the free market to respond to market forces. A supply loss’s proper response in a market economy is higher prices. That is an absolute basic tenet of economics: supply and demand. If you don’t have supply and demand anymore, you don’t have a market economy.
Okay, let me, on the free-market topic, speculate for a second. Hypothetically, how would the U.S. government and allied entities manipulate these markets? What could they be doing, and how does it end?
They said they were going to short futures. Has that ever happened before? Have there ever been similar comments like that about shorting futures in the U.S. oil market? I’m not aware of that ever happening.
Okay, but how it could theoretically happen is that they could sell front-month contracts with money out of thin air. That would obviously show up somewhere on the income statement or the balance sheet. They could short front-month contracts and then basically just not deliver and pay out instead, because the futures market in the United States is physically settled.
Some people are basically saying that every contract represents actual physical oil barrels. Some people are buying, and other people are selling. What the government could do is say, “We’re going to have special rules that are just for us. We’ll just pay you if we’re short contracts and you’re long those contracts. We’ll just give you money.”
Got it. I mean, dude, you make the whole thesis very compelling. It’s why I wanted to have you on. What, other than just oil, obviously, are you long right now?
I’m a commodities and infrastructure specialist, so I focus mainly on shipping.
Okay.
And shipping is how all of these value chains move. If you want to know what’s happening in oil, agriculture, or global trade, you can follow shipping, and that tells you where things are flowing, how things are moving, and how things are priced.
I follow shipping, refineries, oil, chemicals, and mining. Last year, I did really well on platinum-group metals and platinum mining. I’ve also done really well in the past on oil production, refining, and chemicals. These are capital-intensive, old-economy assets—the foundation of everything—that people want to pretend don’t exist. But these are the things that keep your lights on. This is what your clothes are made of.
Yes.
Are you a vegetarian, or are you a carnivore?
Carnivore.
Well, there’s a whole lot of energy, oil, and fertilizer that goes into every steak.
I know. You don’t even think about this stuff, too, right? I mean, you do, obviously, but I don’t. Historically, I have not thought about this. It’s a good point.
Your microphone, my chair—the energy to process that stuff, and in some cases the synthetic materials themselves. Even if, in the background, you’ve got an office made out of wood, just to harvest and process that wood, you’re talking about skidders, chainsaws, big trucks, and forklifts. You’re talking about machines the size of a football field that take the logs, saw them into little strips, divide them by grade, and get the sawdust out.
I actually used to work on building with wood.
Really?
Yep.
Are you a vegetarian?
No. No, I’m definitely not a vegetarian.
Okay. If you’re right—even if you’re 25% right—but let’s say you’re 100% right and it plays out roughly how you think it’s going to play out, how high does oil go?
Again, you get higher prices or you get shortages. In the 1970s, they tried to stop higher prices. Nixon actually had a price-control board. He had a Price Commission, and guys from the U.S. government would sit down and say, “Okay, how much should this cost? How much should this cost?” Nixon actually did that.
I actually had a commemorative plaque that Nixon gave to the guy who ran the Price Commission.
So, these are the possibilities. My biggest fear when betting on higher prices is that we don’t have free markets and higher prices won’t be allowed. But if that’s the outcome, great. If the Strait stays closed, or if the damage to infrastructure continues, then you can get shortages. You can get long lines at gas stations. You’ll notice things cost more in other places in the economy that are harder to directly control.
If the price of oil gets subsidized, capped, controlled, or manipulated, you still have all these derivatives. That means you could have shortages in the derivatives, and the government can’t control every single market. Even with AI, you can’t control every single market. When you try to control markets, you destroy the incentives for producers, and then people stop producing things.
If the government told you, “Hey, Thread Guy, you can only make so much money on each stream or each podcast that you do. It doesn’t matter how many viewers you have or how successful you are. This is the most you can ever make,” what would be your incentive for working hard, bringing on guests, and doing more shows?
Yeah. It feels like there are extreme parallels to this Nixon era right now. Stagflation as well.
Yes. I think the 1970s—and especially the potential job losses—are important. If you have inflation and job losses from AI at the same time, that’s what the 1970s were known for. It was stagflation, high interest rates, and high unemployment.
Back then, the United States only had about a 30% debt-to-GDP ratio. Our debt-to-GDP ratio now is 130%. In 1982, the interest rate on a mortgage for a home was 22%. That’s 5 times higher than it is now.
If interest rates were at 22% today, with the average debt on the U.S. balance sheet at a 2% interest rate and new debt at just under 4%, the U.S. would be spending about a sixth of its budget on interest payments. It’s ridiculous.
If interest rates went to 1970s levels, then interest would be the only thing we could afford to pay for without printing more money. Then you’re in the Argentina doom loop.
Yeah. Argentina, 10 years ago, was in the same place that we are today as far as its balance sheet and how much it was spending on interest payments. It had less debt and a lower debt-to-GDP ratio. Argentina’s currency has always been a basket case.
Those are some of the places we might be headed. Either we have free markets and prices go higher, or we don’t have free markets and you should be doing what the cabinet members of the Trump administration are doing, which is basically digging bunkers.
And is there a third option? I just have to ask this as the host. Is there a third option where you’re simply wrong and the math is wrong? Is it possible?
Yeah, anything’s possible. But again, I just don’t understand what the incentive is for the Iranians, who have just had their families killed and whose capital has got black acid rain. It’s basically a ticking time bomb for anybody who breathes those fumes.
They’re going to have sky-high cancer incidence in 10 or 20 years. I just don’t see what the incentive for them is to play nice with the United States. If peace breaks out, then I would anticipate that energy prices gradually return to normal.
Got it. I think the market expectations around that—the market thinks that basically oil is back in the $50s by September.
Yeah. I do think that’s extremely optimistic. The general thesis is predicated on this war just dragging on and on and on. Because of that, we are either going to get an energy explosion or some manipulation of prices.
Well, you’re either going to get much higher prices, or you’re going to get what’s called a wartime economy.
Got it.
A wartime economy means you have rationing and shortages. During World War II, you couldn’t get sugar. You couldn’t use all the gas that you wanted. A lot of businesses had to shut down. Businesses were actually nationalized during World War II. The government would basically say, “Hey, I need your ship. I need your factory. I’m going to take it.”
Will my compensation be fair?
I don’t know. Who knows? Good luck. The U.S. government, the Japanese government, and the German government did that. That just happens in a wartime economy.
You lay out a really compelling thesis, and I know you are in wartime in the markets right now, so I appreciate you coming on right now. My last question, and I’ll let you go, is maybe the most important: What are you using as a source of truth on what is real, what is fake, and what is actually happening in the Middle East right now? That seems to be the hardest thing to decipher.
I would say that the stuff you can absolutely count on as being true is basically changes in corporate behavior. If airlines suspend flights, or if airlines resume flights, that’s a signal. AIS is the satellite data for ships. It can be turned on or turned off, but it is indicative of the picture. If you see basically no AIS within the Strait at all, and there are just stories here and there about some Greek tanker owner that ran the Strait from a week ago, and nobody’s going through, right?
There was a company called Borr Drilling that today said they had 3 drilling rigs. They specialize in jack-up rigs, so these are shallow-water rigs that they contract out mostly to that region, including Saudi Aramco. They basically said they had to shut down 3 rigs due to attacks, and they’ve got 3 rigs on standby. The U.S. basically said, “No, it’s fake news. It’s propaganda. No drilling rigs were attacked.” But then you have this company that has to put out a market announcement saying, “Hey, we’re shutting down rigs because of attacks.”
People who actually work in oil and gas infrastructure or shipping can be biased. I think I’m biased. Sometimes I want to believe something’s true and it’s not true. But I also try not to promote anything that I don’t think is true.
If you look at people whose job it is to analyze these markets, they tend to have a much better handle on what’s going on than your Charles Gasparino or your Jim Cramer. You get these macro tourists who don’t follow oil at all. They don’t really know anything about oil, gas, shipping, or infrastructure. If the specialists are alarmed—the specialists, most of them, are never alarmed—then that tells you something.
You’ve been saying this a lot, and I like the take, by the way. The specialists don’t get alarmed, and your specialists are alarmed right now.
I think I get more alarmed than most, but the people that I’ve followed for a long time, who have basically never been alarmed, are like, “Holy.”
I was debating which tweet to open to read to you to open the stream, because you have a lot of good ones. The one that I wrote down and didn’t read is: “Pain is coming. You are all whistling past the graveyard.”
Yeah. Again, either prices or shortages. Pick one.
Look, Calvin, as someone running a show covering what’s happening across everything right now, I am genuinely grateful for the analysis that you’re putting out. I think you’re—I’ve called you Shipping Citrini, as in the number-one shipping guy on Twitter, at least that I’m following, and oil as well. I really appreciate all—
Well, Ed Ryan probably has that title officially.
There’s also J. Mintzmyer, John Konrad, and Sal Mercogliano.
Okay, okay.
These guys all have different takes. I think they’re all probably kind of Western-leaning. Rucker is a really good one to follow, and Anas Alhajji is a good oil follow.
But there are a lot of these random traders. There’s this one Korean guy who’s a real crude oil trader. He trades in size, millions of dollars in size. He was actually in Israel when this happened. He was in a bunker while the missiles were hitting. As the government was basically telling him that it wasn’t happening, he was hearing the missiles—
Hearing it, Jesus.
Explode above him, and he’s buying crude contracts.
It’s dark, Jesus. It’s dark.
Anyways, the point stands. I think you’re putting out really good stuff, and you make a very compelling thesis. I appreciate you coming on and giving us your time here in the middle of chaos.
Is there anything you want to sign off with? Anything you want to shill? Any links or any way to send people? I think you have a lot of fans in this chat right now.
I guess just to say in general: Don’t take degenerate risks that you can’t afford. I had a kind of bad day today. I think I was down, I don’t know, $50,000 or something today. That’s kind of an average bad day.
Don’t take risks that you can’t afford, and don’t get too married to anything, even if you really believe that you’re right. Don’t ever go too heavy on a single thing that’ll take you down. The most important thing in markets and in life, I think, is to live to fight another day.
That was beautiful. Hopefully, we could do it again at some point, depending on how this plays out. But Calvin, I really appreciate the time, man. I think you’re one of the best right now, so thanks again, dude.
Thank you. Nice being on here.
Likewise, dude. Have a good one, man. Peace.