The Price Of Gasoline

Skyrocketing Lumber Prices Have Increased The Average Price Of A New Home By $35,872 In 1 Year

Do any of you remember when you could buy an entire house for $35,000?  There was a time in America when middle class Americans could buy a house and have it paid off in just a few years.  But now existing home prices have soared into the stratosphere, and lumber prices are making it ridiculously expensive to build new homes.  As you will see below, skyrocketing lumber prices have driven up the average price of a new home in the United States by almost $36,000 over the past 12 months.  That is absolutely nuts, but everyone agrees that even more inflation is on the way.

Of course it isn’t just lumber prices that are going haywire.  In California, the price of gasoline has almost reached five dollars a gallon in some areas, and the price for premium gasoline has almost reached six dollars…

Gas prices continued to increase in or around Southern California for the ninth day in a row. And that appeared to be a similar trend nationwide where other states were seeing an increase as well.

The average price of a gallon of regular gas in the Beverly Grove area on Saturday was $4.99 and $5.99 for premium.

We are being told that one of the reasons why the price of gasoline is spiking is due to a lack of tank truck drivers…

According to the National Tank Truck Carriers trade group, up to 25% of trucks are parked around the country because there are not enough qualified tank truck drivers. That number is up 15% from the beginning of last summer.

The demand for drivers took a hit when pandemic-induced lockdowns triggered steep declines in the gasoline market, and drivers opted for other jobs. However, the return to pre-pandemic numbers has been further undermined by unemployment benefits and stimulus checks keeping people away from jumping back into the workforce.

You can thank our politicians in Washington for this mess, and hopefully the driver shortage will just be temporary.

But if you think that the price of gasoline is bad now, just wait until the big war in the Middle East officially starts.

On Monday, the price of lumber continued to escalate dramatically.  According to the Wall Street Journal, lumber futures are now “more than four times the typical price this time of year”…

Lumber futures delivery later this month ended Monday at $1,575.60 per thousand board feet, a record and more than four times the typical price this time of year. Futures rose by the daily maximum allowed by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange during nine of April’s 21 trading sessions.

But don’t worry, because the Federal Reserve insists that they have everything under control.

Hopefully they are on top of things, because we are rapidly getting into crisis territory.  As I mentioned above, rising lumber prices have driven the average price of a new home up by nearly $36,000 in the last 12 months…

Skyrocketing lumber prices that have tripled over the past 12 months have driven the price of an average new single-family home to rise by $35,872, according to new analysis by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), with the price spike threatening to hobble the momentum of the U.S. housing market, one of the bright stars of the recovery from the pandemic recession.

Thanks to the completely and utterly insane policies of our “leaders”, high inflation is here to stay, and it is going to be exceedingly painful.

At this point, even Warren Buffett is acknowledging that inflation is starting to become a major problem…

BECKY QUICK: I will ask this question from Chris Freed from Philadelphia. And whoever wants to take this on stage, “From raw material purchases by Berkshire subsidiaries, are you seeing signs of inflation beginning to increase?”

WARREN BUFFETT: Let me answer that, then Greg can get more into that. We’re seeing very substantial inflation – it’s very interesting. I mean, we’re raising prices. People are raising prices to us. And it’s being accepted. Take home-building. I mean, you know, the cost of– we’ve got nine home builders in addition to our manufactured housing operation, which is the largest in the country.

So we really do a lot of housing. The costs are just up, up, up. Steel costs, you know, just every day, they’re going up.

Flooding the system with trillions of new dollars was a really, really bad idea, but those that control the levers of power did it anyway.

Now we have way too many dollars chasing too few goods and services, and that is driving up prices and causing widespread shortages.  The following comes from an article about those shortages that was just posted by the Wall Street Journal…

Consumers are splurging on cars and furniture—and facing extended waits for delivery. Restaurants and gyms are reopening—and struggling to find workers. Factories and home builders are trying to ramp up—but are short on semiconductors or raw materials.

Our “leaders” are promising that the shortages are just temporary.

And they are also promising that the price spikes are just temporary too.

If everything that they are saying is true, everything will go back to “normal” eventually.

Do you believe them?

In Venezuela today, just about everyone is a millionaire.

But just about everyone is also living in poverty because the currency is essentially worthless.

For years, pundits have been warning about “the death of the dollar”, but now our “leaders” seem determined to murder our currency as rapidly as they can.

I wish that I could say that there is a quick and easy fix to this mess, but the truth is that there is no going back now.

The Federal Reserve has got to keep pumping more money into the financial system or the stock market will crash.

And the federal government is going to continue borrowing and spending trillions of dollars that we do not currently have in a desperate attempt to keep the population happy.

This story is heading for a very tragic ending, and if you can’t see that by now I don’t know what else to say.

***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

About the Author: My name is Michael Snyder and my brand new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available on Amazon.com.  In addition to my new book, I have written four others that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned)  By purchasing the books you help to support the work that my wife and I are doing, and by giving it to others you help to multiply the impact that we are having on people all over the globe.  I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe.  I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article.  The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.  I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook, Twitter and Parler, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help.  During these very challenging times, people will need hope more than ever before, and it is our goal to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as we possibly can.

Do You Remember The Oil Crisis And “Stagflation” Of The 1970s? In Many Ways, 2019 Is Starting To Look A Lot Like 1973…

The price of gasoline is rapidly rising, economic activity is slowing down, the Middle East appears to be on the brink of war, and Democrats are trying to find a way to remove a Republican president from office.  In many ways, 2019 is starting to look a lot like 1973.  For many Americans, the 1970s represent a rather depressing chapter in U.S. history that they would just like to forget, but the truth is that if we do not learn from history it is much more likely that we will repeat our mistakes.  And without a doubt, right now a lot of things are starting to move in a very ominous direction.

“Stagflation” was a term that was made popular in the 1970s, and it occurs when there is a high rate of inflation but economic growth is declining or stagnant.

The U.S. hasn’t had a serious bout with stagflation in quite a while, but it appears that we may be moving in that direction.

Let’s talk about the slowdown in the economy first.  On Monday, we learned that sales of existing homes in the U.S. were way down in March…

Home sales are struggling to rebound after slumping in the second half of last year, when a jump in mortgage rates to nearly 5% discouraged many would-be buyers. Spring buying is so far running behind last year’s healthy gains: Sales were 5.4% below where they were a year earlier.

On a year over year basis, existing home sales have now fallen for 13 months in a row.

That is terrible, and there is no way to “spin” that fact to make it look good.

We also learned on Monday that Office Depot is closing 50 stores.  Of course this is just the continuation of a trend that The Economic Collapse Blog has been tracking for quite some time.

Overall, U.S. retailers have already announced more store closings in 2019 than they did all of last year, and we are on pace for the worst year for store closings in all of U.S. history.

Ouch.

I could go on and on listing more numbers that indicate that the U.S. economy has been slowing down, but I don’t want to repeat much of what I have already shared over the past several weeks.

Meanwhile, inflation is starting to rise significantly in some pretty key areas.  Previously I have explained why food prices are beginning to move up aggressively, and now gas prices are starting to make national headlines once again.

For example, the price of gas in the state of California just hit the highest level in nearly five years…

California’s gas prices continued to climb Wednesday, hitting the highest levels in almost five years.

Motorists throughout the Golden State are paying an average of $4.01 for a gallon of regular gasoline, by far the highest in the country and well above the national average of $2.83, according to a news release from AAA.

The primary factor driving up the price of oil is geopolitical wrangling in the Middle East.  According to CNBC, President Trump intends to stop Iran from exporting any oil at all…

Oil prices surged about 3% at midday on Monday, hitting fresh 2019 highs, after the Trump administration announced that all oil buyers will have to end imports from Iran in just over a week or be subject to U.S. sanctions.

The administration said the State Department will cease granting sanctions waivers to any country still importing Iranian crude or condensate, an ultra-light form of crude oil, after May 2.

If President Trump is successful, it will eliminate approximately a million barrels of oil per day from the global marketplace.

That is a big deal.

And this comes at a time when oil prices have already been steadily rising.

Unfortunately, Iran doesn’t plan to take this move lying down, and their response could potentially spark a full-blown oil crisis.

According to Bloomberg, Iran is actually threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz for all commerce…

Iran will close the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway vital for global oil shipments, if the country is prevented from using it, a senior military official said on Monday in what appears to be a response to the U.S. plan to end waivers on Iranian oil exports.

“If we are prevented from using it, we will close it,” the state-run Fars news agency reported, citing Alireza Tangsiri, head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps navy force. “In the event of any threats, we will not have the slightest hesitation to protect and defend Iran’s waterway.”

If Iran did such a thing, it would throw global oil markets into a state of tremendous turmoil, and it would bring us much, much closer to war with Iran.

In recent days the Iranians and the Trump administration have been trading very angry words, and it certainly doesn’t help that the Iranians just appointed a certified hothead as the leader of the Republican Guards…

Salami has frequently vowed to destroy Israel and “break America.” Iran was “planning to break America, Israel, and their partners and allies. Our ground forces should cleanse the planet from the filth of their existence,” Salami said in February. The previous month, he vowed to wipe Israel off the “global political map,” and to unleash an “inferno” on the Jewish state.

He also said “Iran has warned the Zionist regime not to play with fire, because they will be destroyed before the US helps them.” Any new war, he said, “will result in Israel’s defeat within three days, in a way that they will not find enough graves to bury their dead.”

Hossein Salami is a complete and total nutjob, and I am entirely convinced that he actually wants a war with the United States and Israel.

For a long time I have been warning that we need to watch the Middle East, and a major regional war could potentially erupt at any time.

Let us hope that cooler heads prevail, because a full-blown war involving Iran, Israel and the United States would mean an immense amount of death and destruction.

For the moment, things are relatively calm in the United States, but most Americans don’t realize that we are actually in a very precarious position.

It isn’t going to take much for global events to reach a tipping point, and once they do there will be no going back.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.