We’re getting close to seeing gas prices up a dollar a gallon since the start of the undeclared war in Iran.
The national average is at $3.92 a gallon on Friday, per data from GasBuddy, which had us at $2.94 a gallon on the eve of the war, which was launched on Feb. 28.
The average in Virginia is $3.78 a gallon, also a lot.
Diesel, which passed the $5-per-gallon mark for the first time on Tuesday, is now at $5.15 a gallon; it was at $3.75 a gallon on the eve of the war.
Yikes.
“To kind of put it into context, every penny increase in gasoline prices reduces consumer spending by one and a half billion dollars over the course of a year,” Ryan Sweet, a chief global economist at Oxford Economics, told CBS News.
Translated: an increase of a dollar, which we are on the verge of right now, amounts to a reduction in consumer spending at $150 billion over the course of a year.
More translation: that’s a 5 percent hit on overall GDP.
Final bit of translation on this: that’s almost certainly a recession in the making.
Unless we get this thing resolved, and quickly.
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Chris Graham
