Six Dollars a Gallon: The Diesel Shock and the Liquidity Ledger

I. The Print

On the second Wednesday of April, the Energy Information Administration’s weekly retail survey returned a national average of $6.004 per gallon for on-highway diesel. The figure is not merely a high number. It is the highest number the series has produced — above the June 2022 peak that most analysts had conveniently filed away as a war artifact — and it arrived with a blunt causal attribution attached: an Iranian supply shock. Brent had already moved. Distillate cracks, the refining margin between a barrel of crude and the diesel drawn from it, had widened to a level last seen during the post-invasion dislocation of 2022. And the story was carried not by the wire services that usually report energy, but by a crypto outlet.

That last detail matters more than the price. A crypto publication reporting a diesel record with no crypto anywhere in the story is itself the story. It is a confession that the asset class has stopped pretending to be an island. For eight years I have watched this market argue with itself about whether it is a technology, a currency, or a commodity. The diesel print settles the argument quietly, by implication: whatever else it is, bitcoin and the rest of the liquid crypto complex are long-duration claims on future liquidity. Diesel is now a first-order input into the cost of that liquidity.

I want to be precise about what I do and do not know, because the distinction is the difference between analysis and astrology. The source gives me one price. One cause. Two qualitative consequences — higher transport costs, broader economic strain. It does not give me the date of the print relative to the survey week, the regional decomposition, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve response, or the expected duration of the Iranian disruption. I will treat the number as real, the attribution as plausible, and the persistence as unknown. Everything below is built on that footing. The ledger does not lie, only the interpreters do — and this particular ledger has arrived with most of its pages redacted.

II. Why Diesel and Not Crude

Most crypto macro commentary watches the wrong barrel. The reflex is to track WTI and Brent, because those are the tickers on the evening news and the inputs to the inflation swaps that traders quote. Diesel is the more honest instrument. It is the fuel of freight. A barrel of crude is a promise; a gallon of distillate is work already performed — a truck that moved, a railcar that arrived, a container that cleared port, a harvest that reached a silo.

That distinction is not academic. Crude is a globally fungible, financially deep market with a functioning paper complex that absorbs shocks and re-prices them in seconds. Distillate is tighter, more regional, and far more sensitive to physical bottlenecks — refinery outages, pipeline constraints, Jones Act shipping limits, and the seasonal swing between heating oil demand in the Northeast and agricultural diesel demand in the Midwest. When crude spikes, the financial system can intermediate the shock. When diesel spikes, the shock arrives as an invoice.

This is why the $6 print is a more serious macro event than a comparable move in Brent would be. Diesel is the price of moving everything else. It sits upstream of the trucking margin, the parcel surcharge, the grocery shelf, the construction bid, and the diesel-fired irrigation pump that determines next season’s corn yield. It is the closest thing the modern economy has to a universal tax on distance.

And here is where the crypto connection becomes mechanical rather than rhetorical. Every marginal unit of diesel cost that cannot be passed downstream becomes a margin compression somewhere in the real economy. Margin compression reduces cash flow. Reduced cash flow reduces the pool of discretionary capital that flows into risk assets. Crypto, at the far end of the risk curve, is the last asset in the queue for that capital and the first to be sold when the queue shortens. The transmission is not mystical. It is arithmetic.

III. The 2022 Analogue and the Historical Liquidity Map

I keep a liquidity map that predates my career in this market. It is not a chart of price; it is a chart of what capital was doing at the moment price moved. When I led the liquidity-risk modeling team through the DeFi Summer of 2020, we built the framework on 2018 data precisely because the 2018 drawdown taught us that crypto does not crash from euphoria alone — it crashes when the collateral that underwrites leverage becomes expensive. Diesel was not on our dashboard then. It should have been.

The relevant historical precedent is not 2022 as a price event. It is 2022 as a plumbing event. That year, the diesel spike coincided with a compression in global dollar liquidity, a repricing of the front end of the curve, and a cascade of forced deleveraging across crypto credit. Three Arrows, Celsius, and BlockFi did not collapse because sentiment turned. They collapsed because the cost of the short-term funding that kept their positions alive rose faster than the yield on the assets securing those positions. The diesel shock was one of several inputs into that repricing. It was not the headline, but it was in the water.

The 2022 diesel peak of roughly $5.81 a gallon came and went, and the market treated it as transitory. Whether that judgment was right is now beside the point. What matters is the pattern: a distillate shock compresses the discount rate available to long-duration, non-cash-flowing assets faster than the assets can adjust. Digital assets have no earnings to discount, which makes them maximally sensitive to the rate at which the future is discounted. When diesel repriced in 2022, the crypto complex lost roughly two-thirds of its value against a backdrop of otherwise intact technological progress. The technology did not change. The discount rate did.

This is the historical liquidity map I keep returning to, and it has one consistent rule: crypto drawdowns are seldom caused by crypto. They are caused by the outside world sending an invoice. The invoice this month is written in distillate.

IV. What a Supply Shock Does to the Discount Rate

A supply shock is different from a demand shock, and the difference matters enormously for how policymakers respond — and therefore for how crypto prices behave. When demand collapses, central banks cut. When supply collapses, central banks are trapped. Cutting into a supply-driven inflation impulse risks de-anchoring expectations. Holding or tightening into an economy that is simultaneously being squeezed by higher input costs risks forcing a recession. This is the box that the 1970s built, and every energy shock since has been measured against that blueprint.

If diesel at $6 persists for more than a quarter, the transmission to core inflation is not speculative. It is a matter of accounting. Freight costs feed into the Producer Price Index directly through the fuel and power component, and indirectly into every good that is transported. Some of that passes to the consumer price index within one to two quarters; some of it is absorbed as margin compression; some of it is absorbed by the wage channel if workers demand compensation. The split depends on demand elasticity, which is precisely the variable that nobody can model reliably in real time.

The crypto-relevant conclusion is narrower and cleaner. When the front end of the curve cannot fall, the terminal value assigned to long-duration assets must fall. That is the whole mechanism. Bitcoin, which derives the overwhelming majority of its present value from a discounted future rather than from current cash flow, is the purest expression of this sensitivity in the public markets. It is not a hedge against inflation. It is a lever on the discount rate.

I will say plainly what most of the industry will not: the digital-gold thesis has survived this cycle mostly by definitional drift. Gold has industrial and jewelry demand to anchor a floor. Bitcoin’s floor is the marginal cost of production and the marginal willingness of a leveraged holder to keep holding. In a supply-shock regime, that willingness is exactly what erodes. The 2024 ETF approval changed the ownership base, but it did not change the duration of the asset. Institutions bought the same long-duration instrument with a new wrapper. They did not create cash flow where none exists.

V. Hashprice: The Miner’s Marginal Ledger

The most honest number in the crypto complex during an energy shock is not the price of bitcoin. It is hashprice — the revenue a miner earns per unit of computational power, usually expressed in dollars per petahash per day. Hashprice is the industrial P&L of the network. It converts a speculative asset into a manufacturing business with a known cost structure, and it tells you, in real time, which operators are underwater.

When energy costs rise and the bitcoin price does not rise with them, hashprice compresses. The compression is not uniform. Miners with long-term power contracts priced below spot electricity, or with stranded-gas and flare-gas arrangements, hold their margin. Miners buying power at merchant rates — the majority of the small and mid-tier operators — see their contribution margin approach zero. Some of them shut down. The hashrate chart you see on a dashboard is a lagging indicator of a decision made weeks earlier by an operator whose diesel-fired backup generation became uneconomic.

This matters for the broader market because miners are not just producers; they are creditors and sellers. During the 2022 drawdown, the most damaging dynamic was not the hashrate decline itself but the forced sale of mined inventory by over-levered operators who had financed rig purchases against future production. That is a supply overhang that arrives precisely when demand is weakest. A mining capitulation is a self-reinforcing liquidity event, not a sentiment event.

I will be careful here about what the diesel print implies. It does not directly set the price of electricity for most large miners, who contract for power years in advance and often in deregulated markets where natural gas, not distillate, sets the marginal price. But it does set the marginal price of the backup generation that grid-constrained operations rely on, and it sets the price of the transportation that moves hardware, transformers, and switchgear. More importantly, it signals that the entire energy complex is repricing upward, and electricity contracts renew. A diesel shock is a leading indicator of the next round of power purchase agreement negotiations. Miners who signed cheap 2023–2024 contracts are profitable. Miners renewing in 2026 will discover that the world has changed.

VI. Stablecoin Float as Shadow Money Supply

If you want a single proxy for the liquidity actually available to crypto, ignore price charts and watch the aggregate float of the major dollar stablecoins. The float is a real-time, on-chain measure of dry powder sitting inside the market, issued against reserves and redeemable at par. When the float expands, the market has fuel. When it contracts, the market is being drained from within.

The mechanism by which a diesel shock reaches the stablecoin float is indirect but traceable. Higher freight costs raise the working-capital requirements of every physical business that moves goods. Firms draw on revolving credit lines to fund that working capital. Banks, facing higher drawdowns, tighten the terms on which they extend new credit. The marginal dollar of liquidity that would have found its way into speculative instruments — including, at the far end of the chain, stablecoins and the crypto risk curve — is instead retained inside the operating economy. This is not a story about crypto sentiment. It is a story about the velocity and allocation of credit.

What I look for is the divergence between float and price. During accumulation phases, price flatlines while float grows. During distribution, price rises while float shrinks. During a genuine liquidity drain, both fall together, and that is the signature to watch for in the coming weeks. Liquidity dries up when trust evaporates — and trust, in this context, is the willingness of a lender to roll a line of credit into a business whose margins are being eaten by the cost of moving a pallet.

There is a second-order effect that the industry consistently underweights. Stablecoin issuers hold reserve portfolios dominated by short-dated Treasuries and, in some cases, reverse repo. When the front end reprices upward because of sticky inflation, the issuers earn more on their reserves. That revenue does not automatically flow to holders or into the market. It accrues to the issuer. So a rate environment that is hostile to risk assets is simultaneously accretive to the balance sheets of the entities that issue the market’s base money. That asymmetry is a quiet, structural transfer of value from traders to issuers, and it strengthens the incumbents while weakening the periphery.

VII. Perpetual Funding and Basis: The Real-Time Risk Gauge

If stablecoin float is the volume of fuel, perpetual funding rates are the throttle. They tell you, minute by minute, how much leveraged longs are willing to pay to stay long. When funding is persistently positive and elevated, the market is paying a premium for leverage, which historically precedes a flush. When funding turns negative, shorts are paying longs, which historically accompanies capitulation or a bottoming process — sometimes both, and the difficulty is telling them apart.

Under a diesel-driven macro shock, the correct reading of the funding curve is not directional but structural. What you want to see is whether the basis between spot and futures compresses. A collapsing basis means the marginal leveraged buyer has stepped away and the carry trade that underwrites much of the market’s artificial demand has become unprofitable. In 2022, the basis inversion preceded the worst of the drawdown by roughly two weeks. It was, in retrospect, the cleanest early warning the market offered.

I have learned to distrust any single indicator, and I want to be honest about the limits of this one. Funding rates are manipulable at the margin, and on venues with thin liquidity they can be pushed by a single large position. That is why I triangulate across at least three venues and take the median rather than the mean. A single print on a single exchange is noise.

Rebalancing is not panic; it is preservation. The reason I track funding at all is not to time entries. It is to determine when the leverage in the system has become so expensive that it must be unwound regardless of anyone’s view on the technology. When that threshold is crossed, the unwinding does not stop because the fundamentals are good. It stops when the leverage is gone.

VIII. ETF Flows: The Institutional Valve

I served as lead analyst on the spot bitcoin ETF approval process in 2024, and the work I did then shapes how I read flows now. The structural change the ETFs introduced was not demand; it was a permanent, regulated, intraday-redeemable valve connecting institutional portfolios to the crypto spot market. Before the ETFs, institutional exposure was expressed through futures, trusts, and equity proxies — all of which carried basis risk, counterparty risk, or both. After the ETFs, a pension committee could express a view on bitcoin with the same operational machinery it uses for an S&P 500 sleeve.

That is genuinely transformative, and it is why I forecast the institutional inflow and the resulting supply shock with reasonable confidence. But I want to correct a misunderstanding that has calcified into industry folklore. The ETF valve is bidirectional, and it is more sensitive to the macro regime than to the crypto narrative. When the ten-year yield rises and the front end stays pinned because of supply-driven inflation, the opportunity cost of holding a non-yielding asset rises. A multi-asset allocator does not need to believe bitcoin is going to zero to reduce the position. They need only to believe that the risk-adjusted return of the position has deteriorated relative to a Treasury that now yields something real.

What I will be watching, if the diesel shock persists, is the composition of outflows rather than the total. Retail-driven ETF selling is noisy and mean-reverting. Advisory-platform selling — model-portfolio rebalancing by registered investment advisors — is slower, more deliberate, and far more consequential, because it changes the structural bid. When a model portfolio trims its crypto sleeve by fifty basis points, that is not a sentiment event. It is a rebalancing event, and it does not reverse on a positive headline.

There is also a plumbing issue that the industry does not discuss nearly enough. The creation and redemption mechanism depends on authorized participants willing to make markets in size. In a stressed macro environment, the balance-sheet capacity of those participants is itself constrained. A wide ETF premium or discount is not a market failure. It is a signal that the arbitrage capital normally keeping the wrapper tight to the underlying has been recalled to higher-priority uses.

IX. DeFi Lending Rates and the Leverage Stack

When I modeled liquidity risk across Uniswap V2 and Compound in 2020, the analysis was simpler than it is today. The leverage stack was shallower, the collateral was more homogeneous, and the reflexive loops were easier to trace. Today the stack is a lattice: liquid staking derivatives used as collateral to borrow stablecoins, which are deposited into yield vaults, which are used as collateral for more borrowing. Each layer adds a transmission channel from the outside world into the protocols.

The diesel shock enters this lattice through the stablecoin leg. If dollar funding tightens in the real economy, the marginal cost of borrowing stablecoins on-chain rises, because the entities willing to lend at the margin are themselves facing higher funding costs off-chain. Utilization rates climb. Supply-side rates rise. The borrowing rate on the recursive loops that depend on a positive spread between yield earned and interest paid compresses, and then inverts. When it inverts, the unwind begins at the weakest link.

What I want readers to understand, in a bear market where survival is the only objective, is that the relevant question is not whether a protocol is technically sound. It is whether its collateral can be liquidated without breaking. The forensic question is always the same: what happens to this position at the price the oracle will print, not the price you believe is fair?

There is a specific pattern I have learned to flag. Protocols that report healthy total value locked while a shrinking share of that TVL is actively borrowed are not healthy; they are hollow. The TVL is collateral parked in a vault earning a promotional yield, subsidized by a token emission, waiting to be withdrawn the moment the emission stops or the funding cost of the position turns positive. That structure is not a liquidity pool. It is a queue.

X. Blob Space and the Rollup Subsidy

I hold a view that is unpopular among the engineers who build rollups and obvious to anyone who has read a supply schedule. Post-Dencun blob space will saturate within two years, and when it does, rollup gas fees will rise sharply — plausibly doubling from the subsidized levels the market has come to treat as structural.

The reasoning is not complicated. Dencun introduced a dedicated data availability layer with a target and a maximum blob count per block, priced by an independent fee market. For the first year of operation, demand sat well below target, so the blob base fee frequently sat at its minimum. Rollups passed that near-zero cost to users and marketed it as the new equilibrium. It was not an equilibrium. It was a subsidy — an artifact of supply exceeding demand.

Demand for blob space grows with rollup throughput, and rollup throughput grows with the number of rollups, the number of users on each, and the average size of the data each user posts. All three are rising. The supply of blob space grows only when the protocol changes a parameter, which requires consensus. When demand crosses the target, the fee market does what fee markets do: it clears at a price. That price will be paid by the rollups, and the rollups will pass it to users, because rollups are not charities and their sequencers and provers have costs that are themselves denominated in electricity and hardware.

Why does this matter under a diesel shock? Because the cost of the hardware and power that underwrites the rollup stack is repricing upward at exactly the moment the data subsidy is set to unwind. The industry has spent two years telling users that cheap blockspace is permanent. It is the most expensive assumption in the market, and it has been sold as a guarantee.

The honest framing is that L2s have been running a promotional business model funded by L1 blockspace sold below cost. When the promotion ends, the unit economics of every consumer application built on the premise of near-zero fees will have to be re-examined. A great many of them will not survive that examination.

XI. Tokenized Energy and the RWA Mirage

Every serious energy shock produces a wave of enthusiasm for tokenized commodities. It happened in 2022, and it will happen again now. The pitch is seductive: put barrels on-chain, tokenize the offtake, let anyone hedge freight exposure with a fraction of a barrel. It sounds like financial innovation. It is, for the most part, a three-year storytelling exercise that refuses to die.

Here is the part the pitch decks omit. Traditional energy institutions do not need a public blockchain to tokenize anything. They already possess the three things a tokenized commodity requires: a legally enforceable claim, a settlement system that clears trillions a day, and a custody apparatus that their auditors have already blessed. When a major trading house wants to finance a cargo, it issues a letter of credit, assigns the bill of lading, and clears through a bank. The full stack is unglamorous and it works.

What a public chain adds to that stack is transparency, and transparency is precisely what an energy trader does not want. Cargo flows, counterparty exposures, and inventory positions are among the most closely guarded secrets in commodity trading. A tokenized barrel that anyone can inspect is a tokenized barrel that anyone can front-run. The institutions with the balance sheets large enough to matter are not going to expose their positions on a public ledger in order to save a few basis points on settlement.

The genuine use case for on-chain energy is narrower and less exciting: reconciliation between parties who do not share a common back-office system, in jurisdictions where the existing rails are slow or unreliable. That is a real market. It is simply not the market the RWA narrative is selling. When you see a tokenized-diesel product launched in the wake of this price spike, ask the only question that matters: who is the counterparty, and why does that counterparty need this rail rather than the one it already owns? In eleven years of asking that question, I have received a satisfactory answer perhaps four times.

XII. Energy DAOs and the Compliance Shield

A modest prediction: within ninety days of this print, someone will launch a decentralized autonomous organization for energy trading, and it will be described in a press release as community-owned infrastructure for the democratization of fuel markets.

I have audited enough of these structures to know what to look for. The treasury is never as decentralized as the governance forum suggests. The token distribution is front-loaded toward a small set of addresses that received allocations before the public sale, and those addresses are traceable. Foundation holdings, team vesting contracts, and multisig signer keys are all visible to anyone who bothers to read the chain. The DAO wrapper does not obscure this. It merely provides a legal and reputational shield behind which a conventional corporate structure can operate while claiming the legitimacy of a community.

In 2017, I vetted more than fifty ICO projects and rejected forty-two of them. The rejections were rarely for the reasons the promotional materials anticipated. They were structural: vesting schedules that could be accelerated unilaterally, multisig thresholds that a single party effectively controlled, treasury contracts with upgrade functions that were not timelocked. The energy DAO of 2026 will present the same forensic profile, dressed in better design. The chain does not care about the press release. It records the allocation table, and the allocation table is where the truth lives.

For readers in a bear market, this has a practical implication. When evaluating any protocol that presents itself as a community, do not read the governance forum. Read the token holder distribution, the multisig signer set, and the upgrade authority. If any of those three is opaque, the decentralization is decorative.

XIII. The Decoupling Thesis Is a Misreading

The prevailing hope among crypto holders is decoupling: that the asset class will eventually trade on its own merits, immune to the macro cycle. I understand the desire. I do not share it, and I think the diesel print is a useful test of whether the thesis has any substance.

Decoupling, properly defined, would mean that a supply-driven energy shock propagates to the S&P 500 and to Treasuries but not to bitcoin. There is no plausible mechanism for this. For decoupling to occur, crypto would need either a cash flow that responds positively to energy scarcity or a demand source that is insensitive to the discount rate. It has neither. It has a fixed supply schedule — genuinely valuable, genuinely scarce — and a demand curve that is, at the margin, financed by leverage that becomes more expensive when funding costs rise.

There is a version of the decoupling argument that has more merit, and I want to give it its due. As the ownership base shifts from retail to institutional allocators, the correlation to the Nasdaq should rise, not fall, because the same allocators own both and manage them within the same risk framework. Decoupling from equities was always the wrong target. The realistic outcome is tighter coupling, not looser, because the marginal buyer is now a diversified allocator who rebalances across the whole book.

Every bull run is a tax on due diligence. The 2021 cycle was funded by retail speculation and inexpensive leverage. The 2024 cycle was funded by institutional allocation and a macro regime that permitted it. The regime has changed. The allocation that was justified by a falling discount rate is not justified by a rising one, and no amount of narrative will substitute for that arithmetic.

XIV. The Information Chain and the Crypto Media Problem

There is a detail in this story that I cannot let pass, because it speaks directly to how this market forms its beliefs. The report reached me through a crypto outlet. A crypto outlet is not an energy desk. It does not have a commodities team, it does not have a source in the refining complex, and its incentive is engagement rather than accuracy. When such an outlet reports a diesel record with a specific causal attribution, the correct posture is not dismissal. It is verification.

What verification means, concretely: cross-check the EIA weekly retail series directly rather than through the article’s paraphrase; check the regional breakdown, because a national average of $6.00 can conceal a Gulf Coast at $5.40 and a West Coast above $7.00, and the two imply entirely different transmission mechanisms; check the distillate inventory position against the five-year range; check whether the Iranian disruption is a production loss, an export restriction, or a transit interruption, because each has a different half-life. Until those checks are done, the prudent assumption is that the headline is directionally correct and quantitatively unreliable.

This is not an indictment of the outlet. It is a statement about the architecture of information in a market that has no central bank, no earnings calendar, and no audited disclosure regime. The reader is the last line of due diligence. In an environment where the same outlet publishes a diesel headline and a token launch announcement in the same feed, the burden of separating macro signal from marketing noise falls entirely on the person reading it.

I have made a career out of applying cryptographic verification standards to financial claims. The discipline is the same in both domains. A claim is not true because it is repeated. It is true because it can be checked.

XV. Signals Worth Tracking

The disciplined response to an uncertain shock is not to form a strong opinion. It is to specify what would falsify the current one. I will be watching a small number of indicators, in descending order of information value.

The first is the weekly distillate inventory position from the EIA, measured against the five-year seasonal band. If inventories fall significantly below the band while the price holds above $6, the shock is physical and the persistence assumption is validated. If inventories build and the price recedes, the shock was a squeeze in the paper market and the macro implications collapse.

The second is the front end of the Treasury curve against the long end. A bear-flattening — the front end rising faster than the long end — indicates the market is pricing inflation persistence rather than growth risk. A bull-steepening indicates the market is pricing recession. The two regimes imply opposite crypto outcomes, and the spread between the two-year and the ten-year will tell me which one is winning before the equity market does.

The third is the aggregate stablecoin float on a seven-day rolling basis. Sustained contraction is the clearest available evidence that liquidity is leaving the system rather than rotating within it.

The fourth is perpetual funding across the major venues, read as a median rather than a mean, and interpreted structurally rather than directionally.

The fifth is grid electricity forward contracts in the deregulated markets where most large miners operate. Diesel does not set miner power costs directly, but it leads them. When the forward curves for 2026 delivery reprice, the marginal miner’s cost basis reprices with them, and hashprice compression follows with a lag of one to two quarters.

The sixth is the composition of ETF flows — retail versus advisory — because only the second is structurally persistent.

And the seventh is the language in the next FOMC statement. If the word transitory reappears, I will treat it as a signal that the committee believes the shock is a level effect rather than a rate effect. If instead the language shifts toward acknowledging upside inflation risk, the higher-for-longer regime is confirmed, and the entire crypto discount-rate thesis tightens accordingly.

XVI. Cycle Positioning

What I am describing is not a forecast of decline. It is a description of the regime. Regimes do not determine outcomes; they set the odds. A supply-shock regime sets the odds against leverage and in favor of cash flow, however modest. That is the framework I applied in 2022 when I sold eighty percent of the firm’s speculative altcoin exposure and redirected the proceeds into hedged structured products and secure staking. That decision looked timid for about four months and correct for the following eighteen. Preservation is not a strategy that announces itself. It accrues quietly.

For readers holding through this period, the relevant question is not where the price will be in six months. It is whether the positions you hold can survive a sustained rise in the cost of leverage. That is the test the diesel shock administers. A protocol with genuine, non-subsidized demand for blockspace can survive a doubling of its data costs. A protocol whose economics depend on subsidized blockspace and emission-funded deposits cannot. The distinction has been obscured for two years by a favorable regime. It will be exposed by an unfavorable one.

The deeper point is about positioning relative to the cycle rather than the trade. The 2024 cycle was manufactured by a specific configuration of forces: institutional access through the ETF wrapper, a falling discount rate expectation, and a supply schedule that happened to coincide with both. Three of those three have changed or are changing. The ETF wrapper remains — that is structural and permanent — but the discount rate expectation has reversed, and the supply schedule alone is not a demand curve.

I am an analyst, not a prophet, and I will not pretend to know the price of bitcoin in December. What I know is that the cost of moving a physical good from one place to another has reached a record level, that this cost propagates into the core of the inflation basket with a one-to-two-quarter lag, that it constrains the ability of the monetary authority to ease, and that the asset class I have spent a career auditing is the most rate-sensitive instrument in the world. None of that is a prediction. It is a description of the board.

The ledger does not lie, only the interpreters do. The diesel price is the entry. The question, as always, is who is going to pay for it.