Americans are paying more for gas than they were a week ago. On Sunday, the price of oil hit

$118 a barrel. It has since then come down from those highs, but remains up sharply from the pre-war

price of $70. The price is being pushed up by disruption to oil supply out of the Persian Gulf.

The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman,

typically handles around 20 million barrels of oil a day, close to a fifth of the global oil consumption.

But the war has brought tanker traffic in the strait to basically a standstill.

When analysts have looked at the things that could go wrong in global oil markets,

this is about as wrong as things could go at any single point of failure in the global system. That's energy analyst,

Kevin Book, co-founder of Clearview Energy Partners, an independent research firm. He told NPR that

the effective closure of the straight is the worst case scenario. Meanwhile, in a Monday interview on CNBC, Goldman Sachs co-head of commodities research, Samantha Dart,

said the escalation in the war over the weekend made matters worse.

So we saw news that some Iran oil facilities were getting hit.

So this number one does not de-escalate the situation. And if you don't have the

escalation, the market starts to price in, not just your regular gradual adjustment that

requires a little bit of higher prices, but rather, hey, this massive shock might last longer than

we think.

Consider this.

The average price for a gallon of gas has jumped up 50 cents in a week,

and a surge in energy prices

ripples across the economy.

So what does the Iran war mean for affordability?

From NPR, I'm Scott Detro.

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