This post is part of a series chronicling news coverage of rising prices in the United States. See more here.
CNBC's Steve Liesman breaks down how Trump's war with Iran has already cost Americans $59 billion in extra fuel costs
Liesman: “That amounts to about $450 per household” at a time when real incomes are falling behind inflation
Published
Video file
Citation
From a May 29, 2026, video uploaded to the YouTube channel of CNBC Television
JOE KERNEN (CO-HOST): New reporting this morning on higher gasoline prices and the impact on spending. Senior economics reporter Steve Liesman joins us now.
…
STEVE LIESMAN (CNBC SENIOR ECONOMICS REPORTER): The gas bill, Joe, from the surge in oil prices is starting to add up for consumers, raising concerns about whether the resilient consumers so far can hang on much longer. Mark Zandi at Moody's.com, he calculated the total bill so far, at the request of CNBC. I asked him for this a couple of days ago, that's how I knew it was coming.
He finds it equals $59 billion, made mostly of gasoline. Then there's a diesel cost and an implied jet fuel cost, those higher airline fees. That amounts to about $450 per household, a cost that's been manageable, in part, because you can see there, bigger tax refunds have offset it. But in mid-May, you can see the extra fuel costs outstrip the refunds, that's averaged about $380. So, now it's higher.
Zandi warning, "Unless the war ends soon, financially pressed consumers will have no option but to turn more cautious in their spending, threatening the already soft economy." And Goldman Sachs has come to a similar conclusion. They wrote in a report, "We believe that the recent resilience in spending largely reflects an outsized boost from the OBBBA-related tax cuts and expect that spending headwinds from higher inflation will weigh on spending growth for the rest of the year."
Now, the potential offsets to this, you could have better job growth, you could have better wage growth, and also you might have expanded oil production and reinvestment of those petrodollars. In the meantime, for now, real incomes, consumers adjusted for inflation, real incomes have fallen in 5 of the past 7 months. And there's the year over year rate, and that includes the past 3, as inflation has taken a bite.
…
LIESMAN: Zandi estimating, if we go on the way we've been going, prices stay at the current level, it's going to be about a $2,000 hit per household once you do the one year anniversary of the start of the war.
…
KERNEN: You tell us where we are currently. I don't know where we're going. I mean, the futures, the oil futures did come down. We're in this 60-day thing.
LIESMAN: Yeah.
KERNEN: I don't know what, you know, it'll take time to get rid of the mines, take time to get things flowing again, take time to get things to refiners. So, we're talking 6 months anyway, aren't we, Steve?
LIESMAN: Joe, this is really weird, and I've been reporting this other side of it, which is obviously, if you want to know what's going to happen to the consumer, you gotta know what's happened to oil. So, I was talking to our friend [energy analyst John] Kilduff yesterday, and he talked about this idea of the kink in the fire hose.
And you know what that kink is? It's 175 million barrels that are sitting loaded on ships in the water. This is why you don't have $150 barrel oil, or $200 barrel of oil. That's because if you can make that deal with Iran, then that kink opens up, and this oil comes flooding onto the market, and you're going to have a reasonable response. The weird thing about all this is what you don't have once you get on the other side of that 170, you don't have anything behind it, so the actual hit could be another year from now. Meanwhile, we might get some relief.
Also, Joe, if you take a look at what's happening to U.S. inventories, they're plunging. So, we're getting close to some kind of reckoning point here if we don't open up the strait relatively soon. And I know that's been said for the last couple of months, so you want to be a little bit wary about that, but the math is the math when it comes to the inventories here.