Jeff Currie has a message for anyone hoping fuel prices calm down before Election Day: don’t count on it. The founder and CEO of Real Macro, and one of the most closely watched voices in global commodities markets, said on September 11, 2026, that US average gasoline prices have an “extremely high probability” of hitting $5 per gallon before the November 3 midterm elections.
With the national average sitting around $4.27 to $4.29 per gallon as of mid-September, that forecast implies a roughly 17% jump in under two months.
It’s not just crude oil — it’s the refinery problem
Currie’s thesis rests on a distinction most casual market watchers miss. Crude oil is the headline number people track, but the real story in energy right now is in refined products: gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Refinery outages, geopolitical disruptions near the Strait of Hormuz, and the steady erosion of Russian refining capacity have combined to create a supply crunch that crude benchmarks alone don’t fully capture.
The metric Currie wants investors watching is the crack spread, specifically the 3-2-1 crack spread, which measures the profit refiners make by turning three barrels of crude oil into two barrels of gasoline and one barrel of diesel. When that spread widens dramatically, it signals that refined products are scarcer than raw crude. Right now, Currie says those spreads are at multi-decade highs, with diesel crack spreads exceeding $100 per barrel.
