It Turns Out President Biden Is A Genius Oil Trader
Friday night, Chris Hayes explained this underreported story that illustrates just how competent and good for the economy President Biden and his administration are.
Hayes began by reminding viewers how powerfully damaging to the U.S. economy and our politics OPEC has been in the past. In 1979, for example, OPEC almost tripled its prices after Iranian oil production dropped in the wake of its revolution. “The fallout knocked Jimmy Carter right out of the White House,” Hayes said, and “American presidents have been bedeviled by OPEC ever since.”
That is until President Biden figured out a genius workaround. While Donald Trump was being charged with 88 felonies (recently convicted of 34 of them) and overrun with grievances and dreams of authoritarian retribution, Biden was expertly managing the U.S. oil supply.
The Economist explains how he did it:
In 2022, when he released 180m barrels of crude—or one-third of America’s stockpile—he sold at an average of $95 a barrel. In July last year, when the West Texas Intermediate (wti) benchmark was at $67 a barrel, he began to refill the reserve. The president has replaced about one-fifth of what he sold, posting a profit of $582m, and has managed to time the market to perfection.
Treasury officials estimate that Mr Biden’s early sales knocked about $0.40 from the price of a gallon of petrol.