Oil Prices and Inflation: Why Diesel Costs Still Matter
Tuesday, October 6, 2026 · Johnny Hopkins
During their recent episode of the Acquirers Podcast, Travis and Carlisle discussed Oil Prices and Inflation: Why Diesel Costs Still Matter. Here’s an excerpt from the episode:
[Tobias] Yeah. A little bit to unpack there. Let’s go first to oil because I’ve noticed that when we post these videos that folks are very interested in oil.So let’s talk about oil for a little bit. Oil prices on a real basis are nowhere near previous peak. So I think that the 80s peak in real terms is something like $230, which is just unimaginable at the moment.
This is on WTI. And we saw like $100 WTI. And I think, well, I saw yesterday it’s fallen to $90.
I’m guessing because there’s a little bit of oil coming through the straight. And oil equities haven’t really at any point responded to the oil price, even though I think that they’re much better managed now than they have been in the past. I just think they’ve been so starved for capital for so long that they’ve had to adapt, and that’s made them better managers.
Also, there’s the shale in the US means that there’s a little bit of a cap on prices. And it’s also that the economy is much less oil intensive energy. It’s energy intensive.
It’s much less oil intensive than it used to be. And I guess that that’s a trend that just continues on. I don’t know if that’s EVs driving or we’re just finding substitutes or what is causing that.
Or maybe it’s just that the efficiency of business, most of it being done online, means that oil is just not as impactful as it used to be. But the thing that really is interesting is the diesel and the oil prices at the pump seem to be extremely high so that the distillers are doing very well, and the cracks are very wide. Diesel, I think I said this a few weeks ago, but they’ve only got figures for three figures on the price charts here.
It only goes to $9.99. You can’t go over that. They’re accommodating these new numbers, which is a scary thought. So it’s not quite the handbrake, it seems, on the economy that it used to be.