It Could Happen Here - Economic Echoes of the Strait of Hormuz

Episode Date: May 7, 2026

Mia discusses the dire economic effects of the blockade across Asia and why the ripples haven’t reached the markets. Sources: https://archive.vn/1qeiu https://thelensnola.org/2026/04/01/how-the-iran-war-is-disrupting-the-worlds-medicine-supplies/ https://archive.vn/pM5a6 https://archive.vn/u38pm https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/asia-battles-rising-uneven-toll-energy-crisis-caused-by-iran-war-2026-05-04/ https://eastasiaforum.org/2026/04/16/the-iran-war-widens-indonesias-fiscal-faultlines/ https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/plastic-bag-chaos-shortage-fears-highlight-taiwans-energy-security-concernsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform?

We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential.

Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hard Way with your favorite therapist and host, Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing.

How many men carry a suit or armor? It signals to the world that you're not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to. Listen and learn the hard way on the IHare radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until Karma made her pay for it. All right, Sophia, tell me about how we started this story. She moved in for two weeks, lasted five days, left a mess, and then pressed her ear against their bedroom door and burst in screaming. When kicked out to a hotel, she called her son-in-law's workplace, pretending his partner had,

then rushed to the hospital by ambulance. She faked a medical emergency. And spoiler, that was just the beginning. To find out how it ends, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also Media. Welcome to Get Happened here, a podcast about things falling apart and, although not today, putting them back together again. Today, we are going to be talking about some of the ways in which the world is falling apart. and the ways that they've been invisibleized.

Now, there are obviously a wide and broad variety of ways in which the world is coming to pieces, but one of them is the impact of the continued dual blockade now of the Strait of Wemus. The sense you get reading the papers, if you were looking at the economic reality of the situation, is that everything is broadly fine. The economic impacts have been less bad than expected. The economy is proving more resilient. Economies, particularly in East Asia, are hanging on better than predicted. China has been resilient.

America has been resilient. Trump will eventually back down, which will head off the worst-case scenario, long-range forecasting of material shortages. Now, the rest of you, I'm assuming, if you're listening to this podcast, you live in reality and not the distorted, mirror world of the stock market. Stock market, as I think everyone has been able to see by this point, is increasingly unmoored, if it ever was moored to begin with, from the reality of how the global economy

is actually functioning. Trump has been able to play a game by which she makes the appearance of backing down every time the stock market seems to be actually tanking, and the markets have simply come to believe as an axiom that if they simply bet that Trump will eventually back down, it will simply happen. No, it hasn't. The war is continuing a pace, and it seems to have no signs of slowing down. But the markets are behaving as if they know that it's going to happen. And this has created a kind of paradox, where on the one hand, there is us living in this world, and on the other hand, there are the markets living in a world where everything is going to be fine.

And in the world that we live in, things are not good, but they are breaking, I think, more slowly than people tended to expect. Now, part of this, and we will go over this in this episode, is that the impacts of this have been worst felt, obviously in Iran itself, and then across South and East Asia, which are markets that are incredibly, and economies that are incredibly reliant on not just oil, but things like naphtha and also fertilizers that pass through the Strait of Formuz. But if the markets are wily, coyote, hovering in the air through the sheer power of not looking down, the rest of the economy is a kind of slow-moving train wreck. It isn't collapsing all at once,

but the more you poke through and the more you go past the first page of the newspaper and start looking at the later ones and the more of it you look at the press in other countries, the more you begin to realize that things are going quite, quite badly. Now, in the West, the sign of this has been $5 a gallon gasoline in vast portions of the United States. We are, quite frankly, seeing the better side of it.

There have been widespread shutdowns of transportation across South and East Asia. Buses simply aren't running both public and private. There have been strikes and protests over high gas prices by people who normally drive buses. Even in the U.S., you can talk to people who try to do Uber deliveries, and it's becoming effectively impossible even to do that, simply because gas prices are so high. but they are simply nowhere near as bad here as they are in places like the Philippines. Now, the interconnected nature of the global economy means that there are things that are being broken right now that are going to break more things later down the line and are continuing to break things down and cross the supply chain,

but the ripples are moving slowly. Transportation costs are something that we tend to think about in terms, of moving people around, right? We kind of think about it in terms of buses in terms of cars. However, one of the very significant issues that we are running into across

particularly South East Asia, also Southeast Asia, to combining all sort of, I don't know, three of the regions, a bunch of the island nations in the Pacific are dealing with as two to various extent. Sri Lanka has been one of the worst hits to the extent that we're seeing a bunch

of these countries are doing kind of like miniature government shutdowns. And obviously, there's a bunch of different versions of this Pakistan, for example, is going into more debt in an attempt to sort of keep the economy running. But returning the transformation costs for a moment, it is important that we also understand that goods are transported and increases in the price of gasoline to the point where it's simply, you know, impossible to afford, also affects shipping.

and in particular it affects things that are delivered on trucks. I'm going to read this quote about Vietnam and rice production in Vietnam. Quote, in today's abnormal times, rice buyers are hesitating. Shipping delays of 10 to 15 days have become common as carriers slow steam to conserve fuel. Osmati rice from India bound for the Middle East has been unable to get through this trade of Ramos. In the Philippines, wholesalers are not sure when there might be enough diesel to move imports around the country. That means rice has been piling up across Asia, creating a short-term paradox. Wholesale prices declining as production costs rise.

After a year of healthy harvests, traders are paying farmers less right now to hedge against future risk. So this is a really complicated fucking mess, right? what the New York Times is saying here is that buyers aren't buying the massive amount of rice that has already been planted, right? But on the other hand, there's also now we're running into fertilizer shortages because of a bunch of elements for fertilizers that is used in a lot. I mean, this is also affecting the United States too, but it's significantly worse in places like the Philippines and places like Vietnam. some of the important elements needed to create fertilizer past the trade of farm moves, they're not getting through. And this means that on the one hand, farmers are facing enormous rising production prices. But production is a process that takes place over and through time, right?

And this is something that very importantly, most economic models are really, really bad at dealing with. Conventional macroeconomic models assume time and space don't exist to a large extent. like this is like a real issue for a lot of large-scale economic models. Unfortunately, they exist here. And so what we're dealing with, right, is that there has been production that's already happened because there's already have been harvests. But now farmers can't sell the stuff that they've harvested because the transportation costs are so high that the buyers don't want to buy it.

But that means also, on the other hand, food is still getting more expensive on your end because even though the people making the food can't get enough money for the food they are selling, because again, the buyers won't buy it because it's too expensive, you're now also paying, like people in the region are now paying increased rice prices because they have to pay the shipping cost. So even though, on the one hand, right, the actual price that consumers are paying is going up, right? And the cost to produce the rice is also going up. the actual price at which these people can sell the rice is going down. And this is a fucking nightmare.

It means that crops aren't getting planted. It means that crops are also just rotting in the fields because there's no way to sell and move them. This is causing really, really significant concerns that we are going to be, you know, like we are looking over the coming months at a kind of agricultural catastrophe, where you're starting to see sort of projections of people going, oh God, like, hey, what if people simply stop exporting food? There's a great quote in this New York Times article from a guy who's a senior fellow in food security at Singapore's ISEAS, where he says, quote, complex systems have a habit of creating wicked problems. The way that, like, capitalist markets interact with food shortages is a complete fucking nightmare.

And this is something that we have seen that has caused famines all over the world, is that once you get into the point where food genuinely becomes scarce, which is not quite the point where we're at now, we're in the beginning of the process by which this could happen, right? The part of the process we're in right now is these farmers who also, by the way, and this is also very important, these rice farmers are not operating on particularly high margins, right? they are not very wealthy when I say low margins, right?

They are not making all that much money. And so, you know, being unable to sell your rice, you're being forced to sell it at an extremely low price, and then having your production costs rise because your cost of fertilizer is skyrocketing is how these things effectively go under. If this stuff continues, this is how you get waves of people being forced off their land

because they simply can't afford to do the farming anymore, right? But then, you know, you also have, sort of, in some sense, you have the reverse of this in other places where if you look at what's happening in India, we talked about this on an executive disorder a few weeks back, you know, like a bunch of the ceramics industry. It's just like shut down and like 400,000

people are out of work from this. And this is causing those people to, okay, like, what do you do when you can't get work in sort of urban industrial centers as you go back to a lot of the rural places where these people are from? But, you know, the thing about

oil, right, is that oil price increase is something that hits people across the board. It hits both rural and urban economies because they both are heavily oil dependent. This is something that New York Times mentions when you're talking about rice problems in Vietnam, right? Part of the other thing that's been making rice like harder to farm is that their irrigation system is powered by like diesel engines, which is pumped rich and diesel stuff. And so because of that, you know, There's sort of like broad scale shortages in Vietnam, and you have to choose whether you're, you know,

using the limited amount of diesel that you have in cities or in rural areas. And so these things are just kind of rapidly becoming a nightmare. Now, you know what? It's the products and services that support this podcast. Canadian women are looking for more. More out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are at them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce The Honest Talk podcast.

I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygle and friends.

me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me.

Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yarn herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion?

We're open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque.

Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship

until karma made her pay for it. Wait a minute, Dakota. How bad did it get? Well, it got bad enough that her son-in-law had to eventually arrest her himself. She moved in for two weeks, lasted for five. She left nail clippings in the bathtub, candy stuck to the furniture, and then she pressed her ear against the bedroom door and burst in screaming. She did not burst in while they were... She did.

They kicked her out and paid for her hotel, and they thought, it's finally over. Days later, she called her son-in-law at work, claiming that his partner had been in some kind of freak accident and had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. He called every hospital in the city, and his partner was making coffee the entire time. She faked a medical emergency just to test whether or not he loved her son? Yeah, and she sat in the hospital parking lot, waiting for him to see if he would show up. When that didn't work, she walked into the son-in-loss police station and filed a kidnapping report against him.

She filed a kidnapping report against him in his own police station. And spoilers, karma's going to show up in the best way possible. So if you want to hear how this story ends, search OK story time. on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to podcasts. And we are back. So I want to talk a bit about why the system is structured like this and why, you know, on the one hand,

like we are starting to see things that are very incredibly alarming in East and Southeast Asia on varying levels that, and I guess I should be really. clear about this, right? The actual economics impacts of this are really dispersed. It depends a lot on how wealthy of a country you are in and then also like how reliant on oil your economy is. So the Chinese economy, for example, is not been that badly affected because they have large oil supplies. The Taiwanese economy, you know, like there's kind of plastic bag shortages. And that's But another element of all of this is like people panicking about are there going to be enough trashbacks?

Because for reasons that I will get into in a second, like, plastic is made of oil, right? Everything around you that is plastic is just oil. And it does turn out that you do need crude oil in order to produce plastics. And this has been causing lots of production issues across like a whole variety of sectors that use plastics. Now, the bottom hasn't just completely fallen out yet. and it's worth taking a little bit of time to examine why. And the reason why it hasn't immediately collapsed is actually strangely the same reason why we're in this mess from the first place, which is that in a lot of ways, the way that our system

of production works, the way that we produce things in the world and the way that we move things around is made in the image of oil. So what do I mean by that? what I mean is that the system of production is very nodal, right? It operates on a whole bunch of these nodes, and you know, you have a node where a part of a production is happening, and then that node moves an item from one thing to another where it goes to another stage of production process,

and inputs and outputs come in in these nodes. And the thing about these nodes, right, is that in theory, you know, the way the system is supposed to be designed, right, and the way that it's been sort of, they call it like, flexibilization to some extent. The way that it's supposed to work is that like, okay, so like if you are a company that needs to get, like, I don't know, you're like a ramen company

to take an example that's been in the news, at least in these, like in East Asia, like there's been disruption to like Robin making companies, right? And you need plastic. You have like one plastic supplier you normally going to, but there are a bunch of other ones, right? And so, you know, or maybe maybe a better way to explain this would be using the example of, like, the way that, like, fast fashion works and the way that,

like, drop shipping works, right? Where there are, like, there are all of these different, like, small sort of factories around China are, like, these small, like, sort of garment production places where you can, like, very, very quickly crank out the same, like, dress or whatever. And if you're doing the drop shipping, you can, like, source your dropship stuff from one of, like, a hundred of these places, right? Now, this is what I mean, what I say, that is no is that it's designed in such a way that a blockage in one part of the system isn't supposed to be that bad

because the system isn't designed in a way where there's like one railway from one place to another and you have to move all of your goods along this one railway and you can only get it from like one buyer who produces a thing, you do produces and everything,

you're supposed to be able to get it from like a broad distributed network of people. And if one node of the network goes out, you're supposed to be able to pivot to another one. And this is the way that the economics of oil works, right? There are a shit ton of different oil producers. And in theory, you're supposed to be able to pivot around between different oil wells in a way that's different from, for example, the way that coal worked. Right. With coal, and a lot of this I'm sourcing from Timothy Mitchell's book, Carbon Democracy, which is very, very good.

you know, with coal, right, you're usually not moving it by ship, which is this is like another thing that we're going to get to in a second. But with coal, it's very easy, the way that coal is mined and the way that you have to move it, right? It goes from one place to another to another to another in a line. And if one part of that process shuts down, there isn't like another coal thing you can get your coal from, right? You're just fucked. Like, there's not like, another mine that feeds into your factory. This is sort of the way that coal production worked in sort of the 18 and early 1900s. Oil works in basically the opposite way, right? Where there's just like a shit ton of things and because you're mostly moving it by water and to some extent by pipeline,

the way the production process works and the way that it's sort of easier to move and just like the way that it flows means that it's harder to block off the entire supply of oil in the same way that it was actually kind of easy to just like completely stop up huge swaths of the economy by just blocking off their access to coal.

And Capital has like long realized the danger of choke points. This is called foreshadowing. This is a literary device, etc., etc. You know, the choke point used to be coal mines and the railways on which like coal was moved, right? And one of the things that Timothy Mitchell argues is that a lot of the militancy of the 19th and 20th century labor movement is a direct product of the ways in which these coal miners were both extremely militant

and also very, very easily able to shut down production in a line by mobilizing a force that was greater than their numbers. A relatively small portion of, you know, like hyperbilligent coal miners can shut down like the rest of the economy because everyone else is relying on their being. being called. But oil has the opposite problem. We're like, the problem with coal is that there's not enough of it. So you have to constantly extract it. The problem with oil is that there's too much of it. Right. If you shut down coal production, it's a nightmare for the companies that

produce coal because they can't make any money because there's like a fixed number of mines and it takes like large scale capital investment to like get them out. And it's also true that like it's expensive to extract oil. But the thing about oil is again like there were just, there are too many refineries, right? This is sort of why OPEC was formed. If you shut down production, if you restrict the amount of oil that comes onto the market, that's actually how you make money. Versus, if you shut down coal production, suddenly nobody's making any money versus oil, where it's like if you shut down oil production, usually it just means that like the oil companies make more money because the price of oil goes up. And the specifics of why this is true, I would encourage people

to go re-carbon democracy. I could spend another like two hours talking about the materiality of oil and why it specifically works like this differently. But yeah, oil has the opposite problem of coal. Like, there's too much of it. And so this goes to a point where Mitchell talks about how in the early 1900s companies are deliberately setting off oil strikes, right, because it'll raise their production prices. Because shutting down their own production and having an excuse to shut down their own production, like we'll let them just knock off oil refinery so they can reduce the amount of oil in the market. The system of oil is designed to get a, around these blockades, right? This is a big part of the reason for the transition from coal to oil.

Specifically, it was, like, the U.S. and the Marshall Plan was trying to defeat these extremely militants, like French unions after World War II. And these unions were largely coal mining base, and they were like, oh, shit, we can, you know, we can do like a pivot to Saudi Arabia to move to oil. And this can be, like, this can be our solution to, like, crush these coal mining unions because oil is extremely hard unionized. It has, like, a highly divided workforce. You know, and so they tried to design this system that doesn't have choke points. But the problem is there's one fucking big one and that one big one

is the straight of Hormuz and at this point the sort of advantage of the system right which is that it's all these different nodes that are like bound together in this like extremely convoluted weave the strength of the system is also its weakness

it means that we're all getting dragged down together with the system when it stops working because we all rely on stuff from all over the world the way that the system has bowed us altogether means that we're all reliant on every other part of the economy

and we're all reliant on oil. And this is sort of the root of the catastrophe and also the reason why this crash is operating in slow motion. In order to stop the international labor movement, right? The system was set up in a specific way where it works a long nose and is supposed to be designed to deal with a crisis like this. So instead of collapsing immediately,

it collapses in slow motion. but it is still collapsing because capital, and I guess like the presidents of the United States, has taken the action that the system was designed to avoid, which is like, you know, like a large scale blockade of production. And the consequences of this are both dire and expanding as we speak. Yeah, this has been, it could happen here. Things are only going to get worse before they get better.

It could happen here. is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.

Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential.

Either way, the podcast is, Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hard Way with your favorite therapist and host Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that's really not safe to

have anywhere, but you're having him with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor? It signals to the world that you're not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to. Listen to learn the hard way on the AHA radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until Karma made her pay for it. All right, Sophia, tell me about how we started this story.

She moved in for two weeks, lasted five days left. a mess and then pressed her ear against their bedroom door and burst in screaming. When kicked out to a hotel, she called her son-in-law's workplace, pretending his partner had been rushed to the hospital by ambulance. She faked a medical emergency. And spoiler, that was just the beginning. To find out how it ends, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.