Jeff Currie warns of $5 gas prices before midterm elections

Jeff Currie has a message for anyone hoping fuel prices calm down before Election Day: don’t count on it. The founder and CEO of Real Macro, and one of the most closely watched voices in global commodities markets, said on September 11, 2026, that US average gasoline prices have an “extremely high probability” of hitting $5 per gallon before the November 3 midterm elections.

With the national average sitting around $4.27 to $4.29 per gallon as of mid-September, that forecast implies a roughly 17% jump in under two months.

It’s not just crude oil — it’s the refinery problem

Currie’s thesis rests on a distinction most casual market watchers miss. Crude oil is the headline number people track, but the real story in energy right now is in refined products: gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Refinery outages, geopolitical disruptions near the Strait of Hormuz, and the steady erosion of Russian refining capacity have combined to create a supply crunch that crude benchmarks alone don’t fully capture.

The metric Currie wants investors watching is the crack spread, specifically the 3-2-1 crack spread, which measures the profit refiners make by turning three barrels of crude oil into two barrels of gasoline and one barrel of diesel. When that spread widens dramatically, it signals that refined products are scarcer than raw crude. Right now, Currie says those spreads are at multi-decade highs, with diesel crack spreads exceeding $100 per barrel.

Diesel prices have already moved sharply higher, reaching approximately $5.80 to $5.90 per gallon nationally. Diesel matters enormously because it powers freight, agriculture, and construction.

Currency debasement adds fuel to the fire

Currie also pointed to currency debasement as a compounding force behind the price spike. When the purchasing power of the dollar erodes, commodity prices denominated in dollars tend to rise even without any change in physical supply or demand. This dual-pressure setup, physical scarcity meeting monetary inflation, is what Currie calls a “toxic combination.”

The structural underpinning of this crunch goes deeper than any single geopolitical flare-up. Years of underinvestment in energy infrastructure, particularly in refining capacity, have left the system with little buffer. Refineries are complex, expensive, and take years to build or meaningfully expand.

What this means for markets and voters

Elevated fuel prices feed directly into headline inflation figures, and a renewed inflation surge in the final stretch of 2026 would complicate monetary policy decisions at exactly the wrong moment.

High gasoline prices have a well-documented history of shaping voter sentiment. The correlation between pump prices and incumbent party approval ratings is one of the more reliable patterns in American political economy. A national average at or above $5 by late October would arrive precisely when early voting is underway and campaign narratives are hardening. A $5 gallon is also a psychological threshold, the kind of round number that generates its own news cycle and becomes a symbolic shorthand for economic discontent.

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