An electronic billboard with an image of President Donald Trump reads “I love the inflation.” – Donald J. Trump June 10, 2026,” is seen near I-74 in Cincinnati, Tuesday, June 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) Asked about the latest Consumer Price Index report showing inflation hitting 4.2 percent, a three-year high, President Trump gave an answer that deserves to run on a loop in attack ads from now until November: “You know what I really love?” he said. “I love the inflation.” The war with Iran, he explained, is the only thing propping up prices, so once it ends, inflation is “going to come down like a rock.”
If the president genuinely loves inflation, then he is in luck, because we are about to get a great deal more of it. No peace deal can change that. The war’s inflationary effects cannot be simply switched off at a signing ceremony.
The first hit to our pocketbooks already landed, at the pump. While the president maintains a peace agreement will bring immediate relief here, the truth is that we can expect it to keep hurting for months after the strait of Hormuz opens. Economists actually have a name for the phenomenon Trump is betting against — “rockets and feathers.” This term was coined to express how prices in concentrated industries rise like a rocket when costs spike, only to drift down like a feather when cost pressures finally ease.
Gasoline is the quintessential example of an industry where prices move in this pattern. Research from the Federal Trade Commission found that retail gas prices rise more than four times faster than they fall. This isn’t the product of some dark corporate conspiracy. When a massive, visible shock hits an entire industry simultaneously, every firm knows its competitors face identical cost pressures, so they all raise prices in unison. No phone call between CEOs is needed — the supply shock itself does the coordinating. On the way back down, that same logic works in reverse. Nobody is eager to cut first.
We ran this exact experiment three years ago. After Russia invaded Ukraine, gas jumped by $1.48 a gallon in roughly four months, peaking at $5.02. It then took nine months to fall back to pre-war levels, and even that was only achieved with the government pressing its thumb on the scale by releasing emergency oil reserves. Four months up, nine months down.
With the national average now above $4 a gallon for the first time since that 2022 peak, anyone expecting a rock should prepare for a feather.
Don’t take my word for any of this; take the federal government’s. The Energy Information Administration, which in January projected gas would average $2.95 a gallon in 2027, now projects $3.64. So Trump’s own forecasters are pricing in the war’s effects more than a year past any plausible peace, even as he promises pre-war prices the moment the ink dries.
And gasoline is the fast channel. The Producer Price Index, which measures the prices businesses pay before consumers ever see a price tag, rose 6.5 percent year-over-year in May, its hottest reading since 2022.
Worse still, prices for the rawest inputs at the very start of the supply chain jumped 3.2 percent in a single month, the largest increase ever recorded. That is inflation that has already happened; it simply hasn’t reached store shelves yet. Higher costs for diesel, jet fuel, industrial chemicals, and freight will eventually pass through to consumers over the coming months whether the Strait of Hormuz reopens or not. A signature on a peace deal cannot un-ring that bell.
The longest fuse of all is food. Fertilizer is made from natural gas, and the war has sent gas prices soaring while trapping roughly 30 percent of the region’s urea exports behind a mined and impassable strait. Farmers in the Southern Hemisphere are planting right now, and many of them cannot get, or cannot afford, the fertilizer their crops require. Skimp on fertilizer this month and the harvest comes up short half a year from now.
This is precisely why the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization is warning of a systemic shock to the global food supply and the European Union just committed approximately $600 million to help its farmers buy fertilizer. Next year’s grocery prices are being set in the fields today, and no signing ceremony can retroactively fertilize them.
Relief will come eventually. Prices will ease the way they always do, slowly and unevenly, drifting down like a feather. The only rock in this story is the one the president hung around his own party’s neck when he told Americans paying $4 and up for gas that he loves their inflation. He had better mean it. It will be with him long past the midterms.
Nicholas Creel is an associate professor of business law at Georgia College and State University. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of his employer or any other organization.
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