Today's Top Stories From the Breitbart News Desk

The White House this morning announced that it would release 50 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum reserves in a coordinated action with allied oil-consuming countries. We suppose this was inevitable after OPEC rejected the Biden administration's pleas for more oil earlier this month. Indeed, the market seemed to think so, pushing down the price of oil in the three weeks leading up to today's actions.

The market was unimpressed. Perhaps traders were expecting a bigger release from the U.S. Or perhaps they were underwhelmed by the releases planned by the likes of Japan, Britain, and India. Whatever the cause, the price of oil rose by more than three percent on Tuesday, exactly the opposite of what was intended.

Most importantly, the global market understands that OPEC is very much still in the driver's seat when it comes to oil prices. U.S. production and rig counts are still well below the pre-pandemic levels. With the Biden administration's policies and rhetoric aimed at discouraging investment in fossil fuel exploration and extraction—with the promise of even worse to come, perhaps in the form of the Federal Reserve pushing banks against taking "climate risk” investments—there's little chance of U.S. supply recovering. Who is going to invest new money in rigs when you can get subsidized returns by investing in electric fuel stations?

Those same policies also disincline the rest of the world's oil producers from increasing production to boost the U.S. economy. Why should the Saudis do us any favors when our ruling party has promised to eliminate the Kingdom's source of national wealth? The optimal strategy now is to extract as much wealth from the world, in the form of high prices, for as long as possible.

Perhaps out of frustration with the market refusing to take orders, President Biden later on Tuesday said he was instructing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether high gasoline prices were being caused by "illegal and potentially anticompetitive" behavior by "gas supply companies." He even had the nerve to complain that oil-producing nations had not increased supply to meet global demand. Apparently, no one in the White House bothered to tell the president that the U.S. is the biggest laggard in this regard, with 45 percent fewer operating oil rigs today than pre-pandemic.

– Alex Marlow & John Carney
Breitbart News Network