Publications: Notes at the Margin

The Return of Price Controls to Petroleum Products (January 26, 2026)

 

The Trump administration claims to support deregulation. This is a lie. Over the president’s first year in office, he has slowly but steadily exerted Stalin-like controls over the US economy. These have ranged from the absurd—an executive order prohibiting the broadcast of other football games during the Army-Navy game—to the serious—usurping utility regulators’ authority to set power prices, requiring utilities to keep coal plants operating, and decreeing that investment banks should be restricted from buying private homes. Trump has also commanded pharmaceutical companies to lower prescription drug prices, demanded that banks limit credit card interest rates to 10%, and leaned on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates.

 

These measures, in concert or alone, could disrupt the US and global economies in a way that takes us back to the 2008 crash or worse. Professor Robert Kagan of Yale wrote in The Atlantic that the United States is becoming an international pariah and that its citizens will bear the costs for “years to come.”[i] Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks was blunter, fretting in “The Coming Trump Crackup” over the “unraveling of President Trump’s mind” and the United States’ degeneration.[ii] These developments are terribly important and could do long-term damage to the country and the world. Here, though, I focus on a more immediate, if minor in the global sense, matter: the potential return of US price controls on energy.

 

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