Prior Straits

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For the first decade of my professional career, the U.S. economy was defined largely by its deficiencies. Employment lagged for years after the Great Recession, especially for non-college-educated men in their prime earning years. Money was free or cheap to borrow. Even after the housing market had recovered, economic activity remained moribund.

Americans hated it, and politicians proposed various schemes to backfill the gap. One of these ideas was the Green New Deal — a once-in-a-generation investment in clean energy and low-carbon infrastructure that would put Americans back to work and deploy the economy’s spare capacity for the public good.

How things have changed: The main story of the American economy today is one of constraints. On Tuesday, yields on 30-year Treasury bonds reached their highest level since 2002, meaning the federal government’s long-term borrowing costs are higher than they’ve been at any point since I was in elementary school. Electricity demand is surging, and global stockpiles of gasoline, diesel fuel, and crude oil are in short supply. No wonder, then, that many of the inputs to the energy system — such as transformers or natural gas turbines — remain expensive or in short supply. Or that the inflation rate remains stuck higher than 3%.

What’s funny is that Americans still hate it. Consumer confidence fell last month to its lowest level since 2014, according to new Conference Board data released on Tuesday. You can chock that up to oil prices, which have climbed since Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in March. But there’s a deeper mystery going on, too — the economy is picking up, hiring is increasing, and the U.S. is experiencing a physical investment boom of a scale not seen in decades.

It’s not what I would have predicted back in the 2010s. Talking to a fellow policy nerd at a Climate Week event in New York on Thursday, we joked that we all owe an apology to Boomer politicians, who had once seemed inordinately obsessed with the 1970s. It turns out that Americans really do despise inflation above all else, even when it accompanies robust economic growth.

On that front, there are two interesting developments. The first is that America is seemingly succeeding in its battle to wrench the Strait of Hormuz back open in its ongoing war with Iran.

In recent days, more than 10 million barrels of oil have exited the Strait of Hormuz on tankers accompanied by U.S. Navy ships, according to the ship tracking data provider Kpler. Another 6 million barrels have left through other routes. Last year, about 20 million barrels of crude oil were shipped through the strait each day, according to the International Energy Agency.

That could eventually help lower some fossil fuel costs — at enormous cost, of course, to the American public — but it will not happen quickly. Global refinery capacity remains constrained, and future diesel prices are much higher now than they were when the war began. This means diesel prices could likely stay stubbornly high for some time, helping China’s effort to electrify its heavy-duty truck fleet and even providing some tailwind for Tesla’s new Semi truck, if it ever gets released.

The second development is that the Senate seems to be moving ahead with permitting reform. The bipartisan team that has been negotiating the deal announced a deal late on Monday (as my colleague Alexander Kaufman detailed in Heatmap AM), and the lawmakers will hold a press conference on Wednesday where they’ll release bill text. Senate leadership seems to be eyeing a vote on the legislation after the midterm election. That bill — if the deal is a good one — could theoretically help grow the power grid, loosen some of the constraints on the clean energy economy, and make it easier to build new kinds of public infrastructure.

But we’ll know more when we see it — and we’ll see it soon. We’ll be covering the deal on Wednesday and, I’m sure, for many weeks to come.