Hormuz Shockwaves

A conflict thousands of miles away can still reach straight into your wallet, and the Straits of Hormuz is one of the fastest ways it happens. I break down the latest developments that changed in just 24 hours, including the strike on Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG hub and why even partial LNG disruption can rattle countries that depend on imported natural gas.

We also clear up a question I got from listeners: why would shipping insurance rise for routes that are nowhere near the war zone? I explain how marine insurance and fleet-wide risk pricing works, why those costs get distributed, and how that turns into higher freight rates, higher diesel costs, and higher prices on everyday goods. Then we look at the knock-on effects as ship traffic slows through the Strait of Hormuz, lawmakers float the idea of a “safe passage” toll, and governments discuss escorting tankers.

From there, I bring it home with practical preparedness advice you can use right now: taking pantry inventory, buying a little ahead on staples you actually eat, and filling up the gas tank before the next jump. I also touch on precious metals like silver, why prices can swing hard during uncertainty, and why none of this matters if you cannot sort real updates from misinformation online.

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Transcript

Quick Update And Listener Thanks

SPEAKER_00 0:02

You are listening to the Common Sense Practical Prepper. My duct tape. The real duct tape. It fixes everything except that decision. Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America. From border to border, coast to coast, and all ships at sea. Here is your host, Keith.

Why Shipping Insurance Costs Spread

Iran Strike Hits Qatar LNG Hub

Why The US Cannot Add LNG

Iran Floats Strait Passage Toll

Ship Traffic Slows And Escorts Discussed

Crude Oil Jumps And Gas Follows

Supply Chain Ripples Through Fertilizer

Pantry Inventory And Buy Ahead

Silver Drops And Metals Timing

Focus On Consequences Not Politics

Misinformation Risks And Closing

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Hey, all this is Keith, and welcome back to the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast, March the 19th, 2026. And normally I don't do back-to-back podcasts. And given some developments that have happened over the last 24 hours, I want to go ahead and provide some updates and then give you a sense of what I'm feeling with this situation. But first off, I want to thank everybody who's been listening to the podcast from last night about the Streets of Hormuz in your grocery bill. It is at 250 downloads, and we are just shy of 24 hours. That by far is the quickest growing podcast, or it's got the most downloads in a 24-hour period of all of my podcasts. So thank you very much for that. So last night we spoke about the Straits of Hormuz, the restricted naval traffic, the price of fuel, diesel, gas, insurance, and all the things that go into it. I got an email and I want to explain a little bit and maybe give a little more detail about what I was talking about. Somebody said when I mentioned that the insurance was going up for ships between China and Los Angeles, even though they're nowhere in the war zone, the person who emailed asked for a little bit of an explanation. So here it is, and I probably should have explained it a little bit better last night. The insurance is primarily being placed on the ships in the Middle East and in the straits. We get that because of the conflict. Now, so the insurance costs need to be spread out across the entire fleet for a particular company. So Joe's freighters, they're going to spread out that cost to all of the ships. So one ship or two ships or 10 ships in the Middle East don't get hammered and they have to raise the prices incredibly high on those particular loads. Here's another example. Here's a more practical example. We spoke about car insurance last night. If you are a great driver and you have never been in an accident, but a bunch of other people on the other side of town where there's traffic jams all the time, if those people get into an accident and we all have Allstate, your insurance rates are going to go up. And you think to yourself, I've been a very safe driver. No speeding tickets, no accidents. I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. Well, look at it this way: you have all these knuckleheads across town that keep getting into these accidents, and their insurance rates are going to climb. They climb too much, they're going to leave the company. So Allstate kind of spreads the misery out among everybody because they want to make sure that they can recoup their losses and get the money out of the crazy drivers through their monthly premiums. So that's that's a very basic explanation on that. So in the last 24 hours, late last night for us, so late Thursday night for us here on the east coast of the US, so mid-morning over in the Middle East, Iran struck a Qatari LNG hub, the largest hub of LNG in the world. I'm not sure if I'm going to pronounce it correctly, but it's the Ras Lafon, R A S Space L A F F A N. It accounts for a huge amount of LNG that goes to India, China, Japan. 17% of that facility is currently offline, and they pump a ton of this stuff every single day. And these countries rely on their LNG. So 17% of this facility is offline and it's going to be offline for a long time. So now China, Japan, India, and several other countries went from, well, we're gonna have to figure something out to holy crap, what are we going to do now? So it's really kind of flipped the script on everything in the Middle East. Since the US is the largest exporter of LNG, why can't we just pick up the Slack and start shipping it all across the world to these other countries? We are already exporting near our max. We don't have any more to ship. We ship out about 14 billion cubic feet a day. I have no idea how much that is. I know what a cubic foot is, but I have no idea, I can't even visualize 14 billion cubic feet. So our LNG infrastructure is at max. So we can't just flip a switch and turn on the extra LNG pipes and start filling up tankers. That's not gonna work. The ships are there, the pipelines are there, we just can't throw a bunch of pipelines together overnight to get this taken care of. So this is gonna be a tough one. And get this Iran's lawmakers are floating a toll for safe passage through the straits. We don't know what it's gonna cost yet. It could be a million dollars a ship, it could be ten million dollars a ship. But picture this some tanker captain in the middle of the gulf, staring at some floating tow booth like it's in the middle of nowhere. He's checking his pockets on the bridge. Hey, do they take debit cards? Does anybody got any spare change? Do they take Bitcoin? Somebody needs to go down and grab a bunch of change out of the vending machines because we've got to pay for this toll. And I could just I can just picture this this big arm just like floating in the middle of the water that's going up and down as these ships go through. It reminds me of the line from Slim Pickens in Blazing Saddles. Somebody's gotta go back and get a shitload of dime. What a classic movie. I'm sorry, I reverted back to my high school self there, but it's a classic movie. Forgive me for my juvenile thoughts here, because I just that's the first thing I pictured. Now, in reality, I'm sure the Iranians will be speaking with the home office of Joe's tanker fleet. Hey, send us$10 million, and you guys are good for your ship for the next three days or something like that. But that's the first thing that entered my mind, this floating tow booth with this arm going up and down, and this Iranian boat, this little patrol boat sitting there telling them to throw the money into the big basket. So anyway, back to the straits. I digress. Still just a trickle of ships, only eight crossings in the last 24 hours. Now, yesterday there were almost 500 ships that were stranded on either side of the straits, not feeling safe to make the transit. A lot of those ships have just turned around and left. They've decided, heck with this, I'm taking a different route, or I'm going back to my home port empty, or I'm gonna go somewhere else in the world and pick up some bananas or some coconuts because I gotta make a living as a captain, and then so does Joe's tanker fleet. So they're going to other places. Now there's also some information out there that the United States is going to escort these tankers through the strait. The administration has asked, I think the UK, Germany, and Japan, hey, can you guys give us a hand? Don't necessarily send any destroyers, but do you have any minesweepers laying around? And everyone's just kind of, it's like, you know, when you ask your kid to do something and they just kind of you know stare at the ground and they shuffle their feet and they start looking around and they don't want to help. But if you think of it this way, Japan, the UK, most of your EU countries, they're in deep kimchi if this does not get figured out very soon. Airplane fuel is gonna go up. That'll be passed on in ticket prices, public transportation, and we talked about things being delivered by truck. So this might get very nasty very quick, a lot quicker than I initially thought. So the price of crude, Brent Crude, I think peaked at 119 a barrel earlier today. Not good at all. It has dropped down to I think 111. So it has dropped down a little bit, but gas prices here in Central Virginia jumped 35 cents overnight. I would not be surprised if it's going to hit$4 a gallon before the end of the weekend. There's kind of a budget gas station I passed on the way to work every morning, and it was$379 this morning. It was$3.79 when I left work, but it would not surprise me if it jumps to$4 or maybe a little more than$4 come Monday. And again, just because the price of crude has gone so high, it causes such a ripple effect. Supply chain is a very complicated animal, and I've delved into supply chain in my current career. I do have a lot of exposure to supply chain. It's not as simple as someone might think. And I spoke about this last night. Well, you know, just put the bread in the truck and take it to the grocery store. We have to work backwards. Something I completely miss was the price of fertilizer. So we have a farmer, he needs fertilizer to grow the corn, to put it on the trucks, to take it to the silo, and then for these silos to dump it into the train cars, the train cars take it to the distribution center, it's then cooked, it's then made into cattle feed. Every step along the line, you can't get it anywhere without diesel fuel. And that's what our trains run on. Per mile, moving something by rail is the least expensive. But there's only so many train cars, there's so many engines, and there's only so much room on these tracks. So if companies want to start moving things towards rail, that's fine. But they need to understand they're probably gonna have to wait in line because you could only put so many trains on a track and be safe. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna take stock or take inventory in my pantry tonight. And this weekend, if I'm low or starting to get low on something, I'm gonna go ahead and purchase it. A week or two ago, I checked my corn supply and I was down to like six or eight cans of corn. I don't know how it happened, I don't know how I missed it on my last inventory, but I surely did. So this weekend, I am definitely going to Walmart and I'm going to load up on some corn. Maybe get, you know, two flats, 40 cans, 30, 40 cans. Again, like I said last night, I would rather get that now and pay whatever it is, 65 cents per can, then two weeks from now, it's 75 cents per can. As we all know, when prices of anything goes up, it goes up very quickly, and then it falls very slowly. That's just the price of doing business. As far as fuel, if you need gas, or even if you don't need gas, if you're at half a tank, you're at three-quarters of a tank, I would go ahead and go to the gas station tonight or tomorrow and then go ahead and fill up. Again, you may save two or three dollars. That's two or three dollars in your pocket that you didn't have to spend. Folks in the EU, the price of fuel per liter is going to go through the roof. It's already high anyway, don't get me wrong, but it's going to go even higher. Now, the folks in the EU, the only thing you have as an advantage over us here in the States is if you live in the cities or even small towns, you guys have public transportation, or some of the cities, large and small, you could walk to the store. You could walk almost anywhere. You don't have to have a car. Very similar to like living in New York City. You can walk pretty much anywhere you want. Here, a lot of room. It takes me 20 minutes to drive to work. There is no public transportation in my area of the county, so I don't have that luxury of jumping on a bus or a tube or anything else to get me to work other than my personal vehicle. Silver took a huge hit overnight. I think it dropped to 67. It recovered a little bit, and now it's up to 71. Again, I've talked about precious metals. It's not for everybody, but if you're thinking about getting into it, this is probably a good time. Don't take this as financial advice because I am not a financial advisor. I just read a lot. And with the dollar being very, very strong and the feds not raising the interest rate, it kind of sets the stage for the price of precious metals to drop. Now it could completely change tomorrow. Something else could happen, and silver could jump two or three dollars, gold could jump four or five hundred dollars. We just never know exactly what it's going to do. So I'm a little bit concerned. I'm not worried, but I'm a little bit concerned on ultimately where this whole thing is going to land, regardless of what you think about the US and Israeli strikes in Iran. Just take that off the table. That's going to keep going, and the entire world at this point has to deal with the consequences. We could we could argue all day whether it was just, injust, whatever, but that that discussion doesn't fill up our gas tanks. That discussion doesn't put food on the table. That discussion will have to be for another day. All right, folks, thank you for listening. Again, I just wanted to do a quick update because so many things have changed in the last 24 hours. The next 24 hours, things could settle down. I don't think they are. Iran is a huge country. We've taken out most of their Navy, we've taken out most of their aircraft, we've taken out a lot of their ballistic missile launchers, but this country is enormous. I think it has 90 million people, give or take. Now, granted, 90 million people aren't launching missiles at everybody, but these missiles are in bunkers, they're underground, they're in caves. We obviously haven't got them all yet because they're still launching missiles at Israel, Qatar, and other Gulf states. And I'm not really sure why I think they're trying to make it painful for everybody. The Qataris were not very happy about a chunk of their LNG processing plant being taken offline. They kicked out the Iranian diplomats and Iranian attaches from the embassy in Qatar. Now that's the first step. Qatar does not have a very large standing army. It is a very small country, only half a dozen ships, 20 or 30 aircraft. I think 9,000 uh soldiers, 9,000 people in uniform. It's not like Qatar is going to launch an air attack or a ground assault against Iran. Would not be beneficial to them to lash back out. So, folks, I would stay close to current events. Get your information from multiple sources. Twitter is an absolute train wreck right now with all the misinformation, all the AI, all the propaganda that's coming from the Middle East. It's very difficult to sort it out. But in situations like this, I think it's important to stay on top of things as best we can. We're not going to get it right every time, all the time, but I think we've got a pretty good grasp on a lot of what's going on. We're smart people. We can separate the good from the bad, the AI slop from the genuine videos. So just keep your ears open, keep your eyes open, see something, say something. It would not surprise me at all if there was another terrorist type attack, another active shooter sometime over the weekend. All right, folks, please, please take care of one another, be safe out there, and until next time.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

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