Editor’s note: This headline has been updated.
American families may end up taking a financial blow from President Donald Trump’s recent strikes in Iran, according to one expert.
The New York Times reported Monday that the Trump administration’s weekend bombing of nuclear sites in Iran is likely to soon have significant economic reverberations around the world — including in the U.S. Iran’s parliament has already voted to close the Strait of Hormuz, which is a significant choke point for much of the world’s oil supply. And Iran recently retaliated against the U.S. by launching missiles at an American air base in Qatar, meaning closing the strait could be a possible escalation in the future if the U.S. insists on striking back on Iran after the missile strikes in Qatar.
Should the strait eventually be closed, it would likely cause oil prices to jump almost immediately. And when combining the prospect of higher oil prices with the current threat that Trump’s tariffs already have on the prices of imported goods, one expert is cautioning that American consumers could see some sticker shock this summer.
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James Knightley, who is the chief international economist at the firm ING, said the ongoing tensions in the Middle East would “squeeze households’ spending power.” He added that there was already “quite a lot of anxiety” about Trump’s new import duties, and that there “could be another wave of pain for the consumer in the form of higher energy prices” in the near future.
“That would be a big negative,” Knightley told the Times.
Trump has already warned U.S. companies against hiking gas prices in response to the bombings. In an all-caps post to his Truth Social account, the president warned: “I’M WATCHING,” and that jacking up prices would be “PLAYING RIGHT INTO THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY.”
Last weekend’s strikes mark the first official move by the U.S. military against Iran since Israel launched a series of strikes on its chief rival in the Middle East that they argue were necessary to halt Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. Initially, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio issued a statement distancing the U.S. from Israel’s offensive, though the recent B-2 bomber flights over Iranian airspace in which bunker-buster bombs were used on Iranian nuclear facilities has pushed the U.S. closer to war with the Middle Eastern superpower.
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Click here to read the Times’ full report (subscription required).
