On July 3, 2008, West Texas crude closed at $145.31 a barrel. Convert that into 2026 dollars and you get $221.29. Nobody has paid that much for a barrel of oil before or since. Not in 2011. Not in 2022. Not this month either.

That same summer produced $6.27 gasoline and $7.30 diesel, when reported in today’s currency (2026 dollars), using the CPI-U for the conversion. Both are still the record.

Neither the 2011 Arab Spring spike nor the 2022 Ukraine spike beat the summer of 2008. This year’s Iran war and Saudi pipeline attacks haven’t beaten it. But because the 2008 price crashed within months, alongside the banks, it got filed under financial crisis instead of oil shock. For five months in 2008, Americans paid the highest real fuel prices in four decades of data.

I know the CPI is crappy, but it is how people think. Trying to present fuel costs without adjusting for the currency debasement in some fashion is misleading as hell. So today I am presenting data on fuel prices in today’s currency as translated through the CPI.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 03:53 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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