Heritage Foundation’s Chief Economist EJ Antoni speculates:
Well, I can imagine. The world price would be slightly lower, but we wouldn’t be insulated from a price shock exactly for the reason he identifies for why natural gas prices have fallen in the US: we lack sufficient facilities to export natural gas (as it’d have to be LNG).
I want to pose a different counterfactual. What if we’d maintained incentives for EV’s, maybe even expanded them more than we did. Then, we’d have a smaller effective price shock, smaller shock to consumer spending. It’s like Dr. Antoni never finished a course in international trade…
(Of course, avoiding the war entirely, and not allowing the Iranians to have a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz might have been even better).
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