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Page F2From§Eachthe early bird edition — 2 October 2026

G7 drains 100 million barrels to fix a war's price spike, saves Americans a few pennies

By SalStaff Writer

“Europe diesel release won’t have much impact on US prices, experts say: ‘At most a few pennies’”, 2 October 2026 (Photo via New York Post — the original report)

As it ran on the front

The price did not rise all at once; it rose like a bill arriving in installments, and every installment had a date.

On September 4th the average American diesel price hit $5.85 a gallon, an all-time high, and the economist Dean Baker posted three words on his way out the door: "Trump did it!" The war in Iran was already in the pan.…

…(cont) By September 11th, diesel had climbed to $6.06 a gallon, a 14 percent jump in a month, 64 percent over the year before. Patrick De Haan, who tracks these things for a living, said the price "is not slowing down." The percentage did the explaining on its own.

By September 22nd, the price had reached the GOP's own ledger. Republicans began telling reporters, on the record, that the price at home was becoming a problem, and the president endorsed a ban on diesel exports to bring it down. By October, it was the release, not the ban, making the announcement.

Which brings us to Friday, and to Paris, where Emmanuel Macron announced that the G7 — the seven countries that keep a reserve against their own bad day — had agreed to release 100 million barrels of diesel and crude. France. Germany. Japan. Italy. The UK. Canada. The United States.

And here is the part the wire buried under the announcement: economists quoted the same day said the release would lower U.S. prices by, at most, a few pennies. Not dollars. Not even a full one. Pennies, plural, is the ceiling.

So walk it in order: a war drives the price to $5.85, then to $6.06, then the president's own party starts to worry on the record, then an export ban that goes nowhere, then a hundred million barrels borrowed from six other countries' rainy-day funds — and the return on all of it, measured by the people who measure these things, is pennies.

That arithmetic is not a metaphor. It is on the record, dated, and it is the whole story.

“They set six countries' emergency tanks on tilt to patch a hole the war dug, and the actual discount lands at a few pennies a gallon. That's the entire return on a continent's rainy-day fund, while diesel still rides over a dollar above last year. The war didn't get cheaper; six new pockets just got found to borrow from.”
Sal
“Look, this is coordinated allied leadership — the G7 acting as one body to stabilize global energy markets, full stop. Sure, the number lands at a few cents a gallon, but that's... actually, the internal figure, forget I said internal, that's not a thing I have. The point is prices are coming down, which is the headline, and headlines are what people read, so — did I just say that? That's not what I meant.”
Chip

Earlier in this story

The receipts

· Inflation Could Soon ‘Get a Lot More Painful’ as Trump’s Iran War Drives Diesel Over $6 a Gallon from the morgue, 11 Sep 2026

This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.