The lefty media know that if they can scare commodity traders silly with their energy doom talk, the markets will run amok and they can point their fingers at President Trump and screech, “Orange man bad!” Enter Bloomberg News.
Bloomberg News teed off its promotion of its May 21 newsletter by managing editor David Rovella with a nice dose of fearporn on X: “If the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t open by August, there may be a risk of a recession rivaling the great financial crisis.”
Despite the ludicrousness of this notion given that the U.S. only imports about 500,000 barrels a day from the Strait (accounting for just 7 percent of crude oil supply), Bloomberg’s end-is-nigh narrative was posted just three hours before news broke that oil prices closed down two percent on the global and U.S. indexes over reports of new negotiations between the U.S. and the Islamist regime in Iran.
If the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t open by August, there may be a risk of a recession rivaling the great financial crisis. https://t.co/aY6yAYm5Ja
— Bloomberg (@business) May 21, 2026
In essence, basing a long-term recession call on volatile energy markets and a region supplying just 7 percent of U.S. crude is like a weatherman declaring a Category 5 hurricane in late summer because it drizzled in his backyard in spring. As economist Daniel Lacalle retorted to Bloomberg’s alarmism: “Hardly.” In fact, using Bloomberg’s own data, Lacalle analyzed May 22, “Markets see low risk of recession and certainly very low chances of a permanent inflation burst, but also discount much higher money printing.” Further undercutting Rovella’s point is that Financial derivatives exchange firm Kalshi just reported that the odds of a U.S. recession fell to an all-time low of 16 percent.
But reading Rovella’s scare-mongering would make one believe the apocalypse was on the horizon:
It’s been almost three months since the start of the Iran war and its concomitant blockage of the Strait of Hormuz. Energy prices have spiked all over the world, and fear is rising about what comes next for the global economy. Well, if the strait doesn’t open by August, markets may find out the hard way. So says Rapidan Energy Group, which warned the continued closure of the waterway through summer raises the risk of a recession that may rival the global financial crisis.
Markets strong, bond yields ease despite higher spot oil prices. Markets see low risk of recession and certainly very low chances of a permanent inflation burst, but also discount much higher money printing.
— Daniel Lacalle (@dlacalle_IA) May 22, 2026
via Bloomberg pic.twitter.com/BnLu7g2r7W
But this comes after a cornucopia of catastrophic crystal ball projections about oil prices that never materialized — such as when CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer was hyperventilating over $200 oil prices in March. Newsflash: It didn’t happen.
Even NBC News tried to spin falling oil prices in April as somehow also being bad for Trump because of “demand destruction.” This reveals the media’s apparent strategy: No matter which way the markets go, outlets like Bloomberg will keep telling their readers they should prepare for their financial last rites in order to chip away at Trump’s political firewall on the economy. Is it any surprise then that consumer sentiment fell to a record low in May? If Americans’ and commodity traders’ media diets are any indication, the answer should be an emphatic “No!”
But there’s another media scheme at play, and it’s underscored by the principle that headlines drive markets.
As Fox Business senior correspondent Charles Gasparino posted on X March 8, commodity traders “trade off headlines, totally myopic in short-term thinking and predicting.” He continued: “They always screw up what's actually going down, never seeing around corners. It was the case in the run up to the 2008 where there was more than a few market "rallies" before the whole market blew up.”
And this doesn’t even touch the fact that the U.S. became a net oil exporter precisely to detach itself from the Middle East energy boondoggle, as Heritage economist Peter St. Onge wrote March 24, explaining why the Iran war’s effect on U.S. energy prices has been relatively muted in light of all the naysaying to the contrary:
Focusing on Middle East oil, in 2006 we imported around 2.2 million barrels a day—roughly 1 in every 9 barrels we used. Trump slashed that to just 500,000 barrels of net imports from the Middle East today—just over 2% of consumption.
Alexa, define “energy independence.”
Make no mistake: The media are well aware that they can manipulate markets with their narrative games only to then pin the resulting volatile price fluctuations on Trump and cause consumers to sour on the economy as a result.
