Rising crude prices reach the pump: gasoline and diesel at record highs in the United States

The development compared with this morning’s edition, which had stopped at the crude oil price, is one step further down the chain: the retail price.

In the United States, the automobile association AAA has recorded a record price for regular gasoline for the Labor Day weekend, at $4.15 per gallon, while diesel touched $5.90, an all-time high. The figures are reported by the WORLD Radio newscast, which places them alongside crude oil prices.

Two readings on the barrel, and why they differ

On Brent the available sources do not agree, and it is worth showing this rather than picking the most convenient figure. ICE quotations processed by Il Sole 24 Ore recorded a 0.48% rise in the September 7 session, to $96.74 per barrel. WORLD instead indicates that $97 was surpassed, described as the highest level since late July.

This is not a contradiction: these are two readings taken at different moments of the same market phase — a closing session and an intraday or subsequent high. Readers returning to this page after having read this morning’s edition, where the $97 figure appeared, should not read the $96.74 as a decline from that figure: they are measurements of different things.

Indicator	Value	Source
Brent, September 7 session	$96.74 (+0.48%)	Il Sole 24 Ore, ICE quotations
Brent, indicated high	over $97	WORLD Radio
Regular gasoline, United States	$4.15/gallon	AAA
Diesel, United States	$5.90/gallon	AAA

The bottleneck

The cause that sources link to the price movement is maritime traffic. According to Reuters, on Monday the transit of ships carrying raw materials through the Strait of Hormuz remained extremely limited: this is reported both by WORLD Radio and by the international press review of Quotidiano dei Contribuenti, which picks up its dispatches.

On this point, a note on counting origins: the two accounts trace back to the same agency, and for the purposes of this outlet’s standards they count as a single origin. The data on reduced traffic is therefore a single reading, not a convergence of independent readings.

What can be said without overreaching is that the sequence described by the sources is consistent: compressed maritime transit through the Strait, crude oil prices at their highest since late July, pump prices at record levels in the United States. The passage from one measure to the other, however, remains a documented temporal sequence, not a quantified causal relationship: none of the available sources measures how much of the pump price increase depends on the barrel price.

Asian stock markets, without a common direction

On the markets the reaction is not uniform. The MSCI Asia-Pacific ex-Japan index gains about 0.2%, South Korea’s Kospi rises 1.2%, the Australian market falls 0.6%. These figures are reported by the same review by Quotidiano dei Contribuenti, based on Reuters: the news currently comes from a single origin; no independent confirmation available.

The divergence between an Asian market advancing and one declining, on the same day and against the same geopolitical backdrop, is a useful reminder: an index’s sector composition weighs more than the day’s news. Australia is a market with a strong commodities and energy presence, South Korea a market dominated by industry and electronics, and the two react differently to the same rise in crude oil prices.

What we do not know

We do not have data on retail fuel prices in Europe or Asia, so it is not possible to say whether the U.S. record is a local phenomenon or an early sign of a broader movement. We do not know the volume of traffic through Hormuz in absolute terms, nor a comparison with levels before the crisis: the source speaks of reduced traffic, without quantifying it. And we have, in today’s material, no data on the production decisions of exporting countries.