The US Navy’s blockade of Iranian ports is working to perfection and is actually preventing Iran from selling oil or getting money. If you’re losing $400 or $500 million a day, it means you’re in a business that has no future. You won’t meet payroll. No retirement accounts. No health benefits either. And your employees and their families and friends get very angry. They have not joined this crazy radical Islamism that is leading to the destruction of their country. Think about this, this is how revolutions start.
And aside from President Trump’s steel backbone in maintaining the blockade, hats off to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for his own maximum pressure campaign via Economic Fury. My sources tell me that the Treasury Department has frozen all those foreign bank accounts of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in places like Turkey, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. These are the generals who have been plundering and stealing from Iran for decades so that they and their children can live a good life outside Iran. That’s what dictators and totalitarians always do. Yet many, if not most, of these Iranian offshore bank accounts have been frozen by Mr. Bessent.
So there are no dollars available for Iran. Very important: no dollars enter Iran. This is the banking freeze. It is also the export-import freeze. And sources tell me that the minister is about to impose sanctions on any country that facilitates trade or financial flows on behalf of Iran. If they do, they will be kicked out of the American economic system. I deleted the Swift accounting book and the New York Fed transaction data. So hats off to Mr. Bessent for keeping up the financial strain as part of the war effort.
As bad as things have gotten in Iran, the other side of the coin is that Trump and Bessent’s economic policies are keeping the American economy in pretty good shape. Four dollars a gallon gasoline hasn’t stopped significant consumer spending. The production has come to life. Take a look at the ISMs and the S&P Global PMIs. Private sector employment has exceeded all expectations. The unemployment rate is a low 4.3 percent.
Looking through the temporary spike in energy prices, inflation is likely close to 2.5 percent, and you can be sure Kevin Warsh will lower it when he takes over. Weekly and monthly unemployment claims remain at record lows. And profits, which are the mother’s milk of stocks and the lifeblood of the economy, are growing explosively.
Productivity is high. Unit labor costs are low. And the business community makes good money to expand, build new factories and pay overtime and tips without taxes. And stock markets are at or near record highs across the board. America is a great capitalist economic machine in the free market, backed by a president who believes in rewarding success, not punishing it. And insists on free and fair trade.
Finally, another reason for America’s wartime economic success is simple: We have oil. Lots of it. Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” of the past decade has been pure genius. We don’t need their oil, we have our own oil. And pretty much the rest of the world comes to us because they need fuel and we are reliable suppliers. Just think about it.
