the orange man moans victory daily but the gas stations advertise reality. larry johnson tells you more;

 

 Karl Miller’s latest private assessment, dated September 16 and titled “Judgment Day Has Arrived,” makes a single governing claim about diesel, jet fuel, and kerosene: physical demand is now outrunning promptly deliverable supply. Not the price of the barrel — the delivery of it. In Miller’s framing the market has crossed from a pricing problem, which money solves, to a deliverability problem, which money alone does not. The next phase, he argues, forces buyers to compete not just for fuel but for delivery capacity and for the cash to fund both at once.

He is describing something the market has already begun to confirm… US retail diesel crossed $6.00 a gallon on September 11, the first time on record, ten days after setting its prior all-time high. The ULSD crack spread — the margin between diesel and crude — hit an intraday record above $108 a barrel on September 3, a level never before sustained, which tells you the scarcity is in the product, not the barrel. Distillate inventories fell to roughly 103 million barrels in late August, the lowest for that point in the calendar since 1951, and the EIA expects them to stay below 100 million through much of 2027. Miller wrote his brief into a market that is already validating its premise.

The governing condition
The spine of the assessment is deliberately simple. Take a recurring shortfall between what a market consumes and what can actually be delivered to it. Inventory and diverted cargoes can bridge that gap for a while. They cannot sustain it indefinitely. Once usable stocks are drawn down, the adjustment arrives as some combination of higher replacement cost, tighter allocation, and reduced activity — and it lands first on whichever buyer, terminal, or airport cannot secure its next delivery on time. Miller’s phrase for the resolution is stark: supply must recover, or consumption must fall. There is no third option once the buffers are gone.........more...........