Oil just crossed $100 a barrel. As of this morning, Brent crude is trading above $114, which is more than 20% higher than where it closed on Friday. That hasn’t happened since Russia invaded Ukraine back in 2022.
If you’ve filled up your car this week, you already know something is off. The national average for a gallon of gas went from under $3 to about $3.45 in the span of a week. And according to reports, there’s roughly an 80% chance it hits $4 within the next month.
But here’s the thing. Gas prices are really just the tip of it. Oil touches basically everything in the economy.
Your groceries get to the store on trucks. Your Amazon packages fly on planes. The stuff on the shelves at Target, Costco, wherever you shop, all of it got there burning diesel. So when oil spikes like this, it’s not just a number on a screen. It’s an invisible tax on your entire life that shows up in ways you don’t always notice right away.
And the part that most people aren’t connecting yet is that this isn’t just an oil story. It’s a money story. It’s a central bank story. And if you hold Bitcoin, or you’ve been thinking about buying some, this might be the most important thing happening in the world right now.
Let me walk you through it.
What $100 Oil Actually Does to the Economy
Most people hear “$100 oil” and they think about gas prices. Which makes sense since that’s the most visible thing. But gas is honestly just the most obvious symptom of something much bigger.
Oil is basically the bloodstream of the modern economy. It’s not just what powers your car. It’s what powers the trucks that deliver your food to the grocery store. It’s the jet fuel that moves packages across the country overnight. It’s the diesel that runs the ships carrying goods from overseas. It’s baked into the cost of plastics, fertilizers, chemicals, construction materials. Basically, if something was manufactured, shipped, or grown, oil was involved somewhere in the process.
So when the price of oil doubles in the span of a few weeks, which is roughly what just happened, it doesn’t just mean you’re paying more at the pump. It means the cost of moving and making almost everything goes up. And those costs don’t just get absorbed by companies. They get passed on to you. Your groceries get more expensive. Your flights get more expensive. Shipping costs go up. Eventually, even your rent can get affected because construction and maintenance costs rise too.
Economists have a word for what happens when prices are rising but the economy is slowing down at the same time: stagflation. It’s basically the worst of both worlds. Things cost more, but people aren’t making more money. Companies are getting squeezed on costs, so they slow down hiring or start laying people off. And we’re already seeing cracks. The US economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the worst jobs report in four months and way below what anyone expected.
This is the part that matters if you’re trying to understand what comes next. Oil shocks don’t just make things expensive in the short term. They create a chain reaction that forces governments and central banks to respond. And how they respond is what changes the trajectory of everything, including your money and including Bitcoin.
We’ll get to that. But first, let’s talk about why this particular oil shock is different from the ones you might remember.
Why This Time Is Different (And Scarier)
You might be thinking, “Okay, oil spikes happen. We saw this in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Prices went up, and then they came back down.” And that’s fair. But there’s a reason this one feels different to people who follow energy markets closely, and I want to explain why.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the fear was about sanctions disrupting Russian oil exports. And that was a real disruption. But the physical infrastructure of global oil was still intact. Ships were still moving. Ports were still open. The market adjusted.
What’s happening right now is fundamentally different.
The Strait of Hormuz, which is this narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, is effectively closed. That strait normally handles about 20 million barrels of oil per day, which works out to roughly 20% of all the oil consumed on the planet. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, about 84% of the crude oil that moves through the strait is headed to Asia, specifically China, India, Japan, and South Korea.
On March 2nd, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officially declared the strait closed and threatened to attack any ship attempting to pass through. And they followed through. At least five tankers have been damaged, two crew members have been killed, and over 150 ships are now anchored outside the strait waiting for things to calm down. Major shipping companies like Maersk, CMA CGM, and Hapag Lloyd all suspended transits. Tanker traffic through the strait dropped by somewhere between 70 and 80 percent almost immediately, and has since essentially gone to zero for commercial vessels.
This isn’t just a price scare. This is a physical supply shock. The oil literally cannot get to where it needs to go. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, these are some of the biggest oil producers on Earth, and most of their exports flow through this one 21 mile wide chokepoint. Qatar, the world’s largest LNG exporter, halted production at its two main facilities and declared force majeure on its gas contracts. Qatar’s energy minister warned that if the war continues, other Gulf producers may be forced to do the same, and said it could “bring down economies of the world.”
And here’s the part that makes this scarier than 2022. Analysts are saying that if the strait stays closed for more than a few weeks, oil could reach $150 a barrel. Some estimates from the IRGC have even floated $200. Now, those numbers might sound extreme, but when 20% of the world’s oil supply is physically cut off with no clear timeline for reopening, the market starts pricing in worst case scenarios very fast.
Israel also struck Iranian oil infrastructure directly for the first time this past weekend, hitting storage depots and a petroleum transfer terminal in Tehran. That’s a new escalation. It means this isn’t just about shipping lanes anymore. It’s about production capacity being damaged.
So to put it simply: 2022 was a trade disruption. This is a supply crisis. And the distinction matters because trade disruptions can be rerouted. Supply crises have to be waited out or solved. And right now, there’s no clear solution on the table.
The Fed’s Impossible Choice
This is where it gets really interesting if you care about your money, and I think everyone should be paying close attention to this.
The Federal Reserve’s job, in simple terms, is to keep two things in balance: employment and inflation. They want people to have jobs, and they want prices to stay stable. When the economy slows down and people start losing jobs, the Fed typically cuts interest rates to make borrowing cheaper and get money flowing again. When inflation runs too hot, they raise rates to cool things down.
Right now, the Fed is stuck. And I mean genuinely stuck.
On one side, the economy is showing real weakness. The February jobs report showed the US lost 92,000 jobs, which was the worst monthly number in four months and way worse than what economists expected.
It was the third month out of the last five where the economy actually lost jobs. On top of that, December’s numbers got revised down into negative territory too. The average over the past several months has been basically flat. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%. Long term unemployment hit its highest level since December 2021. The labor market isn’t collapsing, but it is clearly softening, and has been for a while now.
Normally, when the data looks like this, the Fed would be cutting rates. And some members of the committee actually want to. At the January meeting, two members voted to cut by a quarter point. The Fed has already cut rates by 175 basis points since September 2024, bringing the rate down to a range of 3.5% to 3.75%. But they’ve been holding steady since January because they’re worried about something else.
Inflation.
Even before this oil shock, inflation was still running above the Fed’s 2% target. Core PCE, which is the measure the Fed watches most closely, was sitting around 2.5% to 2.6%. Tariffs have been pushing goods prices higher. And now you’re about to layer on top of that a massive energy price shock that will ripple through basically every sector of the economy.
So here’s the dilemma. If the Fed cuts rates to help the weakening job market, they risk pouring fuel on an inflation fire that’s about to get a lot worse from oil prices. But if they hold rates steady or even raise them to fight inflation, they risk tipping a fragile economy into a recession. There’s no clean answer. There’s no move they can make that doesn’t create a new problem somewhere else.
This is what economists call being “between a rock and a hard place,” and it’s exactly the scenario that the word stagflation describes. Rising prices. Weakening growth. And a central bank that can’t fix one without making the other worse.
And here’s the thing that most people don’t think about: this pattern, this exact kind of trap, is where the real story begins for hard assets like gold and Bitcoin. Because when central banks eventually have to choose, they almost always choose to protect the economy over fighting inflation. They print. They cut. They intervene. And when they do, the value of the money in your pocket goes down.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s look at what history actually tells us about what happens after moments like this.
What History Tells Us About Oil Shocks and Hard Assets
If you only take one thing away from this entire newsletter, let it be this: every major oil shock in modern history has eventually led to aggressive monetary intervention. And every time that’s happened, hard assets have gone up. Not immediately. Not in a straight line. But eventually, and significantly.
Let’s start with the 1970s, because the parallels to what’s happening right now are almost eerie.
In 1973, OPEC imposed an oil embargo on the United States in response to US support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Sound familiar? The price of oil nearly quadrupled, going from about $3 a barrel to almost $12 basically overnight. Then in 1979, the Iranian Revolution disrupted oil supply again, and prices doubled a second time. The result was a decade of stagflation. Inflation hit 14%. Unemployment climbed above 7%. The economy was stuck.
What did policymakers do? For most of the decade, the Federal Reserve tried to walk a tightrope, keeping rates relatively low to avoid crushing the economy, which effectively allowed inflation to run hot. And during that entire period, gold went on one of the most remarkable runs in financial history. It went from $35 an ounce in 1971 to $850 an ounce by January 1980. That’s a gain of over 2,300%. The people who held hard money during that decade didn’t just preserve their wealth. They multiplied it, many times over, while everyone else watched their savings lose purchasing power year after year.
Now, fast forward to 2020. When COVID hit, the world economy shut down and oil briefly went negative. You could literally not give oil away. The response from central banks was the most aggressive monetary expansion in history. The Fed cut rates to zero and printed trillions of dollars. And what happened to hard assets? Gold went from about $1,500 to over $2,000. And Bitcoin went from roughly $5,000 in March 2020 to $69,000 by November 2021. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the pattern.
The pattern works like this. There’s a crisis, whether it’s a war, a pandemic, an oil shock, or a financial collapse. The crisis hurts the economy. Central banks respond by loosening monetary policy, cutting rates, printing money, doing whatever it takes to keep things from falling apart. That flood of new money enters the system. And because there’s more money chasing the same amount of stuff, the value of each dollar goes down. Assets that are scarce and can’t be printed, like gold and like Bitcoin, go up.
Gold is already responding to this pattern right now. It’s above $5,000 an ounce, which is an all time high. It’s up more than 80% over the past year. The market is telling you, in real time, that investors are losing faith in the ability of governments to manage this situation without debasing their currencies.
Bitcoin hasn’t responded yet. And that confuses people. But if you understand the sequence, it makes sense. Gold responds first because it has thousands of years of history as a crisis hedge. It’s the asset institutions reach for instinctively when things get scary. Bitcoin is newer. It’s still treated as a risk asset by most of Wall Street. So in the initial phase of a crisis, when people are panicking, Bitcoin often sells off alongside stocks. It did it in March 2020. It did it in 2022. And it’s doing it now.
But here’s the key insight: Bitcoin tends to respond not to the crisis itself, but to the monetary response that follows. The money printing. The rate cuts. The fiscal stimulus. That’s the catalyst. And we’re not there yet. The Fed is still holding rates steady. They haven’t started printing again. But if history is any guide, that’s where this is headed. Because when central banks have to choose between fighting inflation and saving the economy, they almost always choose to save the economy. And when they do, that’s when Bitcoin moves.
And there’s one more layer to this that I think is important. The Federal Reserve is technically independent, but it doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Jerome Powell’s term as chair expires in May, and Trump has nominated Kevin Warsh to replace him. Trump has made no secret of the fact that he wants rates significantly lower. He’s publicly called for cuts of up to three percentage points. And Warsh’s entire framework, according to CNBC’s reporting, is built around a theory that AI driven productivity gains mean the Fed can cut rates without triggering inflation. That’s essentially a ready made justification for easing, regardless of what oil prices are doing.
On top of that, there’s a midterm election in November. Republicans control both the House and the Senate right now, and affordability is the number one issue for voters. Trump promised a “roaring economy” in his State of the Union address just two weeks ago. Gas prices spiking, job losses mounting, and stock markets falling is the exact opposite of what any administration wants heading into a midterm year. The political pressure to stimulate, to cut rates, to push money into the system, is going to be enormous.
And if you look at Trump’s track record, he has never once chosen austerity. Not in his first term, not in this one. The budget deficit is already running at about 7% of GDP. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” is estimated to pump around $200 billion in tax cuts into the economy this year alone. The instinct is always to spend more, cut rates, and deal with the consequences later. That’s not a criticism or a political statement. It’s just the pattern. And it’s the pattern that matters if you’re trying to understand where the price of money is headed.
So when I say that central banks almost always choose to protect the economy over fighting inflation, I’m not just talking about history. I’m talking about the specific people in charge right now, in this political environment, with these incentives. The printing is coming. The only question is when.
The lag between the crisis and Bitcoin’s response is the opportunity. It’s the window where the smart money is quietly accumulating while everyone else is distracted by the price going sideways or down.
Why Bitcoin Isn’t Responding Yet (And Why That’s Normal)
I know what some of you are thinking. “If all of this is so bullish for Bitcoin, why is it sitting at $67,000? Why isn’t it going up?”
It’s a fair question. And I think the honest answer is one that a lot of people in the Bitcoin space don’t want to say out loud: Bitcoin is trading like a risk asset right now. Not like gold. Not like a safe haven. Like a tech stock.
And that’s not a bug. It’s a feature of where we are in the adoption curve.
Over the past couple of years, Bitcoin has become deeply embedded in institutional portfolios. Hedge funds own it. Asset managers own it. It trades through ETFs on Wall Street. BlackRock, Fidelity, and a dozen other firms now offer spot Bitcoin products. That’s great for long term adoption. But the side effect is that Bitcoin now moves with the Nasdaq, with the S&P, with the broader risk appetite of institutional money. When those investors get scared, they don’t sit there and think about Bitcoin’s monetary properties. They just sell everything that isn’t cash or government bonds. Bitcoin gets caught in that wave.
This is exactly what happened in March 2020. COVID hit. The stock market crashed. And Bitcoin dropped from about $9,000 to under $4,000 in a matter of days. If you were watching in real time, it felt like the thesis was broken. People were writing obituaries. “So much for digital gold,” they said. And then, over the next 18 months, it went from $4,000 to $69,000. Because the monetary response kicked in, and all that new liquidity had to go somewhere.
It happened again in 2022. The Fed started raising rates aggressively to fight inflation. Liquidity dried up. Bitcoin dropped from $69,000 to under $16,000. Again, it felt like the end. And again, once the rate hike cycle peaked and the market started pricing in future cuts, Bitcoin rallied from $16,000 all the way to over $126,000 by October 2025.
The same dynamic is playing out right now. We’re in the fear phase. The crisis phase. Oil is spiking. Stocks are selling off. The war is escalating. And Bitcoin is just kind of sitting there, hovering around $67,000, down almost 50% from its all time high. It doesn’t feel bullish. I understand that.
But the monetary response hasn’t started yet. The Fed is still on hold. The printing press hasn’t been turned on. And that’s the part that historically moves Bitcoin. Not the crisis. The response.
CoinDesk put it well this past week when they wrote about how Bitcoin is increasingly ignoring positive industry news and instead just follows the dollar index and interest rates. The same Wall Street adoption the industry spent years chasing has tightly coupled Bitcoin with macro. That coupling works against you in the fear phase. But it works enormously in your favor once the easing begins.
So if you’re looking at Bitcoin right now and feeling discouraged, I’d encourage you to zoom out and ask yourself: do you think governments are going to let their economies collapse into recession during a war, heading into elections, with unemployment rising? Or do you think they’re going to do what they’ve always done, which is print their way out of it?
If your answer is the second one, then the current price of Bitcoin isn’t a warning. It’s an invitation.
What I’m Watching / What I’m Doing
So what am I actually doing right now?
The same thing I’ve been doing for a while now. I’m dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin. I’ve talked about DCA before, but for anyone newer to this, the idea is simple: instead of trying to time the market and buy at the perfect moment, you spread your purchases out over time. You buy a fixed amount on a regular schedule. Sometimes you’re buying at $70,000. Sometimes you’re buying at $60,000. Over time, your average entry price smooths out, and you remove the emotional decision making from the process entirely. There are plenty of platforms now that let you set this up automatically with little to no fees. It’s one of the simplest and most effective strategies out there, and it’s what I practice personally.
And try not to watch the price 50 times a day. I know that might sound strange coming from someone who writes a newsletter about Bitcoin, but I genuinely think that staring at the chart right now is one of the worst things you can do. Not because the information isn’t useful, but because it pulls you into short term thinking during a moment that is fundamentally about the long term. The price today doesn’t tell you anything about where Bitcoin will be in two years. The thesis does.
And that’s really where I’m spending my time. I’m studying. I’m reading history. I’m going deep on past oil shocks, past monetary cycles, past moments where governments had to choose between letting the economy contract or stepping in with stimulus. The more you understand about how these patterns have played out before, the more confident you become in how they’re likely to play out again. Knowledge is genuinely the best hedge against fear. When you understand why something is happening, it stops feeling random and starts feeling like something you can navigate.
I’m also looking beyond Bitcoin. I’m paying a lot of attention to what’s happening with artificial intelligence right now. AI is one of the most transformative forces in the economy, and it intersects with the Bitcoin story in ways that I think most people aren’t fully appreciating yet. The productivity gains from AI are going to reshape how governments think about growth, how central banks justify policy decisions, and how capital flows through the global economy. Warsh’s entire argument for cutting rates, for example, is built on the premise that AI driven productivity will offset inflation. Whether you agree with that or not, it tells you something about how these tools are going to be used to justify the next wave of monetary easing. I want to understand that dynamic as well as I can.
So my advice, if you want to call it that, is pretty simple. Set up a DCA plan if you haven’t already. Stop trying to guess the bottom. Spend less time looking at the price and more time understanding the thesis. Read about monetary history. Read about what happens when governments run deficits during wars. Read about what happens to hard assets when central banks eventually capitulate. And keep an eye on the bigger picture, things like AI, energy markets, and geopolitical shifts, because all of it feeds into the same story.
Weather the storm through knowledge. That’s what I’m doing. And I think it’s the best thing you can do too.
The Takeaway
Let me bring this all together.
Oil just crossed $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022. The Strait of Hormuz, which carries 20% of the world’s oil supply, is effectively shut down. The US is at war with Iran. Gas prices are up almost 50 cents in a week. The economy lost 92,000 jobs in February. And the Federal Reserve is trapped between an inflation problem that’s about to get worse and a labor market that’s already cracking.
None of that feels good. I’m not going to pretend it does.
But if you zoom out and look at what has historically followed moments exactly like this one, the picture changes. Oil shocks lead to economic pain. Economic pain leads to central bank intervention. Central bank intervention leads to more money in the system. And more money in the system leads to hard assets going up. Gold is already telling you this story. It’s above $5,000 and hitting all time highs. Bitcoin hasn’t caught up yet, but it doesn’t need to catch up today. It just needs the monetary response to begin.
And that response is coming. Not because I’m guessing. But because the people in charge, in this specific political environment, with midterms in November, with a president who has never once chosen austerity, with a new Fed chair who is already building the intellectual case for rate cuts, are not going to sit back and let the economy fall into a recession. That is not how this plays out. It never has been.
$100 oil isn’t just a headline. It’s the first domino in a chain reaction that has played out over and over again throughout history. The 1970s. 2008. 2020. The specifics change. The pattern doesn’t. Crisis. Intervention. Debasement. Hard assets rise.
You don’t need to predict the exact timing. You don’t need to call the bottom. You just need to be positioned before the response kicks in. And the way you do that is boring. It’s a DCA plan. It’s automatic. It’s consistent. It’s the thing you set up now so that when the monetary floodgates open, you don’t have to make a decision under pressure. You’ve already made it.
If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines, this is the part of the cycle where it matters most. Not because it feels good. It doesn’t. But because the people who built positions during moments of fear, historically, are the ones who came out the other side in the strongest position.
The storm is here. But storms don’t last forever. And what comes after is what you’re really positioning for.
I want to hear from you. How are you feeling about everything that’s going on right now? Are you still buying? Are you nervous? Are you watching the oil situation and wondering what it means for your wallet?
Hit reply and tell me. No judgment. I read every single response, and honestly, your replies are a huge part of what shapes future newsletters. If there’s something you want me to go deeper on, whether it’s the oil markets, the Fed, the history of monetary policy, AI, or anything else, let me know.
And if you found this helpful, send it to someone who needs to read it. I think a lot of people are confused and scared right now, and sometimes all it takes is a little context to turn fear into clarity.
I’ll see you in the next one.
Sources
Oil Prices & Energy Markets
Associated Press, “Crude oil prices surpass $100 a barrel as the Iran war impedes production and shipping,” March 8, 2026
Al Jazeera, “Oil soars past $100 a barrel, stocks plunge as US-Israel war on Iran rages,” March 9, 2026
CNN Business, “Oil prices soar past $100 a barrel as war escalates in Iran,” March 8, 2026
Fortune, “Oil prices soar past $110 while Dow futures sink 1,000 points,” March 8, 2026
CoinDesk, “Murban crude oil surges past $100, posing risk to bitcoin and risk assets,” March 8, 2026
Strait of Hormuz & Supply Disruption
U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Amid regional conflict, the Strait of Hormuz remains critical oil chokepoint,” 2025
International Energy Agency, “Strait of Hormuz: Oil security and emergency response,” March 2026
Al Jazeera, “Shutdown of Hormuz Strait raises fears of soaring oil prices,” March 3, 2026
TIME, “Strait of Hormuz Global Oil, Gas Trade Disrupt Amid Iran War,” March 2026
Wikipedia, “2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis”
Iran War
Al Jazeera, “Iran war: What is happening on day nine of US-Israel attacks?” March 8, 2026
NPR, “Trump warns Iran ‘will be hit very hard’ as war enters second week,” March 7, 2026
CNN, “Everything we know on the eighth day of the US and Israel’s war with Iran,” March 7, 2026
Britannica, “2026 Iran conflict,” March 2026
UK House of Commons Library, “US-Israel strikes on Iran: February/March 2026,” March 2026
US Jobs & Economy
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The Employment Situation: February 2026,” March 6, 2026
CNBC, “February 2026 jobs report: Nonfarm payrolls fell by 92,000,” March 6, 2026
AP/ABC News, “Trump’s ‘roaring’ economy meets a rough start to 2026,” March 8, 2026
Federal Reserve & Monetary Policy
Federal Reserve, “FOMC Statement,” January 28, 2026
Federal Reserve, “FOMC Minutes, January 27-28, 2026”
CNBC, “Why Iran war oil price shock won’t stop Trump’s Fed pick Warsh from cutting interest rates,” March 5, 2026
The Hill, “Trump ramps up Fed rate cut pressure after strong jobs, inflation reports,” February 2026
The Boston Globe, “Trump wants to run the economy hot, as midterm elections approach,” February 8, 2026
Morgan Stanley, “7 Political Trends Investors Should Watch in 2026”
Moody’s Analytics / CNBC, “Economist Mark Zandi sees the Fed surprising with three rate cuts in first half of 2026,” December 31, 2025
American Enterprise Institute, “Donald Trump’s Midterm Elections Dilemma,” November 2025
Gas Prices
AAA, “National average for a gallon of regular gasoline,” March 5, 2026
GasBuddy, “2026 Fuel Price Outlook,” January 5, 2026
IndexBox, “Gas Price Hike 2026: National Average Jumps Above $3.30 Per Gallon,” March 2026
Bitcoin & Crypto Markets
CoinDesk, “Bitcoin price,” March 9, 2026
CoinDesk, “Why Bitcoin suffered a $110 billion wipeout despite its best week of Wall Street news in months,” March 6, 2026
CoinDesk, “Bitcoin could crash another 30% as four-year cycle gains strength,” March 7, 2026
CoinDesk, “Bitcoin market bottom may be nearing, at least if measured against gold,” March 1, 2026
Gold & Hard Assets (Historical)
Federal Reserve History, “Oil Shock of 1973-74”
Goldman Sachs / Fortune, “Goldman Sachs says the demand for gold is not just hype,” October 2025
JM Bullion, “History of Gold Prices: 100 Years of Historical Data”
Oil Price Transmission & Inflation Research
IMF Working Paper, “Oil Prices and Inflation Dynamics: Evidence,” 2017
NBER, “Rising Oil Prices, Loose Monetary Policy, and US Inflation,” 2023
Federal Reserve, “Oil Price Shocks and Inflation in a DSGE Model of the Global Economy,” August 2024