Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

And NPR's chief economics correspondent, Scott Horsley is also with us. Hi, Scott.

Good to be with you. I wish the news were better.

Well, welcome to 2026, I guess. And today on the show,

we are going to be talking about a story that I think a lot of us have seen play out every day

at the gas pump. The war in Iran is disrupting global oil markets and supply chains. And we're

going to be taking a look at how that is affecting the broader U.S. economy. But I do want to

start there with those gas prices, Scott.

Can you explain why prices have risen so quickly in the last couple weeks?

Well, we've seen a real disruption in global oil supplies. Iran's retaliation for the U.S.

and Israeli attacks on that country have disrupted tanker traffic through this trade of Hormuz.

About 20% of the world's oil flows through that critical choke point in the global trade.

And that has ripple effects that you can feel at a gas station in Topeka or anywhere in the United States.

And as the price of crude oil has shot up, so has the price of gasoline. In fact, we've seen gas prices jump about 60 cents a gallon since this war began less than two weeks ago.

Can you zoom out a little bit, too, before this war began at the end of February? What was the economic picture in the U.S. at that point? Gasoline prices were already inching up, but more slowly, sort of at their normal seasonal pace. We usually see gas prices go up a little bit in the springtime as refineries switch over to a more expensive blend of summer gasoline. And as driving picks up, you know, kids go on spring break and people are driving a little bit more than they were in the depths of winter.

So we usually see a little bit of an increase and we were seeing that in the last week or two of February.

But then the war began on the last day of February and it actually took a couple of days. For a couple of days, you know, from that Saturday beginning of the war, we didn't see much movement in gas prices or crude oil prices, but by Tuesday, we were starting to see it go up,

you know, a nickel or a dime every day, and that's been the pattern since then. And so we're

now looking at gasoline prices that are up around $3.60 a gallon. And if oil prices just stay where they are

right now, if they don't go any higher, gasoline still has some further increase just to catch

up to where crude oil prices are. We could be looking at gas prices of $3.80 in the near future.

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