{"podcast":{"title":"Paul Krugman Podcast","slug":"paul-krugman-podcast-7703924","podcast_index_feed_id":7703924,"rss_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/277517.rss","website_url":"https://paulkrugman.substack.com/podcast","image_url":"https://substackcdn.com/feed/podcast/277517/97debc08d318fda1d382063e54848600.jpg","author":"Paul Krugman","episode_count":81,"summary":"Notes on economics and more","last_synced_at":"2026-07-26T10:17:51.645609+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924"},"episode":{"title":"My President Went to China, and All I Got Was Even More Expensive Gasoline","slug":"my-president-went-to-china-and-all-i-got-was-even-more-expensive-gasoline","published_at":"2026-05-15T10:30:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/my-president-went-to-china-and-all-i-got-was-even-more-expensive-gasoline","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924","url":"https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/my-president-went-to-china-and-all","audio_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/197826575/91912670168b96b36218701da36e97e7.mp3","summary":"Transcript My president went to China, and all I got was even higher gas prices. Hi, Paul Krugman here. Recording a video today rather than one of my usual posts,.I just feel like I’ve been too immersed in charts and wanted to do something shorter, simpler, whatever. It’s Friday. The summit between Trump and Xi Jinping has wrapped up. Hard to say what exactly was accomplished, but at least Trump is saying that China is going to buy more US oil. That’s the headline on at least some of the financial sources that I look at. And in fact, crude oil prices in the United States have risen at least a little bit in response to that announcement. The odd thing is that Trump seems to think that China buying more US oil is a good thing, which it is probably not from the point of view of the United States and definitely not for him. So let’s walk through what all of this means. Background: The United States, which used to import a large part of its oil, is now a net exporter of oil. That’s what shale oil did. Since about 2020, we’ve been selling more oil to the rest of the world than we buy. Now that’s a net number. It’s actually a fairly complicated picture because there are different kinds of oil and the geography of oil creates some complications. So we have the upper Midwest importing oil from Canada, Texas exporting oil to Europe and it’s a bit of a mix of of where the oil is produced and where it goes so that there are actually quite large gross flows underneath that net transaction. But, okay, that’s not all that relevant here. What is relevant, you might think, is that the United States overall produces more oil than it consumes. And you might think, in fact, some people still seem to imagine, that this insulates the United States, that when the Strait of Hormuz is closed a…","meta_description":"Transcript My president went to China, and all I got was even higher gas prices. Hi, Paul Krugman here. Recording a video today rather than one of my usua…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":803,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/episodes/my-president-went-to-china-and-all-i-got-was-even-more-expensive-gasoline/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/my-president-went-to-china-and-all-i-got-was-even-more-expensive-gasoline.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}