Forecasting is mostly a way of buying peace of mind. You want a number for the worst case so you can decide how frightened to be, and once you have that number, you quietly stop thinking and start bracing for it.
That instinct is not irrational. It is how you decide whether to refinance, whether to take the job across town, whether the August road trip is still on.
Then late February arrived, and the worst case got a number.
When the United States and Israel struck Iran on Feb. 28, Tehran shut the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and refined products. The forecasts that followed were not subtle. Trading desks talked about crude at $150 a barrel. Some of them talked about $200.
You ran that math in your head. Most drivers did. One tank, times 52 weeks, times two cars in the driveway.
Five months later, that number still has not shown up. Brent crude futures peaked around $126 a barrel, comfortably below the 2008 record of $147, and averaged roughly $101 between the start of the war and June 11, before briefly retreating to prewar levels near $70 in early July, according to Reuters.
The distance between that forecast and your actual receipt is one of the most underrated personal finance stories of the year. It is also worth real money to you.
What 5 months of war actually did to oil prices
Start with what a closed Hormuz is supposed to mean. About 20% of the world’s oil and refined products move through it, and before the war, 100 to 130 ships passed through the waterway daily, according to AAA. Traffic has been a fraction of that for most of the year.
That is the textbook definition of a supply shock. The textbook says prices go vertical and stay there.
They did not. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, has swung between roughly $68 and nearly $113 since the fighting began, AAA reported. It sat near $85 on Tuesday, July 21.
At the pump, the damage was real but bounded. Here is the shape of it.
Feb. 28: This is the day the strikes began: the national average for regular gas was $2.98 a gallon, according to AAA.
May 21: The national average peaked at $4.56, its high for 2026, AAA reported.
Early July: Brent briefly retreated to prewar levels near $70 a barrel, Reuters reported.
July 20: The national average climbed back above $4 for the first time since June 17, AAA said.
July 21:WTI traded near $85, roughly $18 higher than a year earlier, according to AAA.
5 reasons the oil price spike never showed up
The mechanics are not mysterious, and none of the five reasons involve luck, according toReuters. They involve a market that had far more slack in it than the models assumed.
China was the surprise. The world’s largest oil importer cut crude purchases to their lowest in nearly a decade by June, curbed fuel exports and shifted drivers toward electric taxis, the wire service reported.
More Oil & Gas:
The United States pumped harder. Domestic crude production hit a record 13.93 million barrels a day by April, and Washington drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of a record 400 million-barrel release coordinated by the International Energy Agency in March.
Saudi Arabia rerouted. The kingdom pushed far more crude out of its Red Sea port at Yanbu, partly replacing barrels stranded behind Hormuz.
Traders stopped chasing headlines. Liquidity thinned, funds refused to build big bullish positions, and the market went numb to each new announcement out of Washington and Tehran. “Everybody is bullish now, but nobody is long,” said Ilia Bouchouev of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
And there was simply more physical crude sitting around than the doomsday models assumed, which is why the European grades that help set the Brent benchmark flipped from a record premium in April to a discount.
What $150 oil would have cost you at the pump
Here is where I ran the numbers, because this is the part that lands in your budget rather than on a trading screen.
AAA’s own rule of thumb is that every $1 move in crude translates to 2.4 to 2.5 cents a gallon at the pump. Crude accounts for roughly 57% of what you pay for a gallon of regular, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Run the $150 forecast through that. With WTI near $85 now, an extra $65 a barrel works out to about $1.59 a gallon, which would put the national average somewhere around $5.60.
The all-time record national average is $5.02, set on June 14, 2022. The consensus disaster scenario would have blown past the worst pump prices in American history by roughly 60 cents.
The $200 version gets uglier. That is about $2.82 a gallon on top of today’s price, or a national average near $6.80.
Now put it in household terms. A two-car family burning 1,000 gallons a year would have paid about $1,600 more under $150 oil, and roughly $2,800 more under $200 oil.
That is a car payment. It is also, for a lot of households, the entire difference between funding a Roth IRA this year and telling yourself you will start next year.
What struck me running this against the actual pump data is how little comfort that offers, because you are already paying.
The national average crossed $4 on July 20 for the first time since June 17, AAA said. At $4.02 against $2.98 on the day the war started, that same 1,000-gallon household is out about $1,040 a year already. Diesel, which sets the cost of nearly everything trucked to your grocery store, hit $5.14, AAA reported.
Five months of war, a closed Hormuz, and gas at $4.02 instead of $5.60.Abraham Gonzalez Fernandez / Getty Images
Why your gas budget is still exposed to Hormuz
The reason this matters going forward is that most of the shock absorbers listed above were one-time moves.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell to 311.4 million barrels last week, its lowest level since March 1983, and has given up more than 104 million barrels since the war began, AAA reported. That cushion does not refill quickly.
China can only cut imports so far. Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea workaround carries its own risk, with roughly 2.5 million barrels a day exposed to Houthi threats, and if a ceasefire does not materialize, “the risk of a significant rebound in oil prices would be substantial,” Rystad Energy geopolitical analysis head Jorge Leon said, according to Seeking Alpha.
Pump prices nationally had been falling steadily since late May, and drivers “can also expect higher prices in the short term,” said AAA Oregon/Idaho public affairs director Marie Dodds.
So stop watching the headlines out of Tehran. They have stopped moving the price, which is exactly what the traders worked out months ago.
Watch the reserve level and the Yanbu shipments instead. Those are the two numbers standing between your current fuel budget and the forecast that never came true, and one of them is running low.
