With the price of oil so high right now, the United States is lifting sanctions from Russia and Iran to try to keep prices lower. Does that make any damn sense? Does any of this make any sense is the real question.

Source: Mediaite

Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joined Maria Bartiromo on Thursday morning to discuss the latest market turmoil from the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, which has sent gas and oil prices spiking following an Iranian attack on a key Qatari gas facility.

BESSENT: We, and Maria, to be clear, this is a coordinated effort. We had a “break glass” plan across the administration and Treasury. We unsanctioned Russian oil. We knew that there were about 130 million barrels on the water, and we created supply that is beyond the Strait of Hormuz. So we anticipated this.

We knew there could be a temporary—and I want to emphasize temporary—chokepoint there, and there was 130 million barrels of floating storage. In the coming days, we may unsanction the Iranian oil that’s on the water. It’s about 140 million barrels.

So, depending on how you count it, that’s 10 days to two weeks of supply that the Iranians had been pushing out. That would have all gone to China. In essence, we will be using the Iranian barrels against the Iranians to keep the price down for the next 10 or 14 days as we continue this campaign. So we have lots of levers.

We’ve got plenty more that we can do. The largest coordinated SPR release in history—400 million barrels—was approved last week, and some countries are going to do more. The U.S. could unilaterally do another SPR release to keep the price down. As you will have noted, WTI and its European counterpart Brent have substantially diverged over the past few trading sessions.

The lunatics truly are in charge of the asylum.