January 17th this year here in the Midwest I

[moniss]

paid $2.77 per gallon for diesel for my truck after my fuel card discount. Retail was $3.19 per gallon. Now on March 14th at the same place I paid $4.25 per gallon after my discount and the retail price was $4.70 per gallon. This is at the cheapest place within 40 miles of me. Many of the fuel stops around me are pricing the discount at more than $4.75 per gallon with retail around $5.49 per gallon. I'm seeing some places with retail diesel prices at $5.69 per gallon.

That 45 cents per gallon means a great deal when you're buying 300 gallons at a time. I would note that the amount of freight has dropped very noticeably which means buying/building etc. is obviously predicted to slow and so that impacts things as well. When you combine this with other factors going forward it doesn't look good at all.

Higher food prices because of deportation of labor, higher diesel costs due to war, higher fertilizer costs due to war combined with shrinking jobs because of people, rightly so, holding back on spending and this begins to look like a grim picture indeed. Keeping in mind that fuel price increases haven't come anywhere near to peaking.

Many of us remember the '70's when prices were up on most everything every time we looked. Day after day and week after week.
So many young people have heard their elders talk about those years but now, sadly, they get the shock of living through that kind of thing.

The announcement of big releases from various countries petroleum reserves gets reported by the media and certainly it helps somewhat but what the media fails to point out is that those releases are not endless and any help from that is quickly used up.