Brent at $103, Record Diesel, and a $43 Billion Partial War Bill
Econbrowser's military-and-economics situation report opens with a cluster of pressures rather than a single story: reduced traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb, front-month Brent futures at $103 with dated European Brent having reached a high of $130, and US diesel at a record high. The same roundup points to a threat of expanding Middle East conflict while US stockpiles of precision munitions and interceptors are depleted. It also puts a partial cost reckoning of the Iran war at $43 billion — partial being the operative word. A partial reckoning is a floor, not a final bill.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The $43 billion is explicitly a partial reckoning, so it reads better as a lower bound on the war's cost than as the bill.
Energy prices and depleted interceptor stockpiles sitting in the same accounting is the interesting part: the constraint isn't only money.