📈  Charts of the Week 3/8/2026

By Michael Allison, CFA

History Doesn’t Repeat, But It Rhymes

As I write this week, I fully acknowledge that the situation in the Middle East is very fluid and the shelf life of this piece could be very short. However, given the importance of current events, I thought it was still worth discussing.

This week’s Charts tell a story that feels eerily familiar, and yet fundamentally different.

The first Chart shows ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most important energy arteries on the planet. In February 2026, daily transits ranged between roughly 100 and 123 large vessels. By the first week of March, that number collapsed to just four or five ships per day, effectively a shutdown.

That’s not a disruption. That’s a chokepoint going dark.

If the Strait remains closed for an extended period of time, the economic implications are obvious. Roughly a third of globally traded crude exports originate from producers that rely on the Strait, including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile, Qatar sends about one-fifth of global LNG exports through the same corridor. When that artery tightens, energy prices move fast. Crude prices have already surged, and refined fuels: diesel, jet fuel, and LNG have jumped even faster.

For investors with a sense of economic history, the parallels with the 1973 Oil Embargo and the 1979 Oil Crisis are obvious. Those events triggered the stagflationary spiral that defined the decade: rising energy costs, falling real incomes, and central banks trapped between inflation and recession.

But the second Chart highlights a crucial difference between then and now.

Since 1990, the energy intensity of global GDP, the amount of energy required to produce a dollar of output, has fallen dramatically. Oil intensity alone has dropped by roughly half, while coal and natural gas show similar long-term declines. Decades of technological progress, efficiency improvements, and the shift toward service-based economies have fundamentally changed the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth.

In the 1970s, oil wasn’t just transportation fuel, it was embedded everywhere: industry, heating, electricity, chemicals, and manufacturing. When supply collapsed, economic output collapsed with it.

Today, the system has more resilience. Electric vehicles, more efficient aircraft, improved building standards, and digital services all reduce the oil-to-GDP link. That doesn’t mean an energy shock wouldn’t hurt. It simply means the direct economic damage is smaller than it once would have been.

The real risk, as always, lies somewhere else.

Repeated shocks: the pandemic, war-driven energy disruptions, supply chain fragmentation, and now geopolitical conflict all begin to change expectations. When households and businesses start assuming that inflation will remain high, behavior changes. Wages adjust, but not usually enough. Pricing adjusts. Policy becomes harder.

That’s the real ghost of the 1970s.

Not the oil itself, but the psychology that followed.

Sources: Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy; Lloyd’s List/Seasearcher

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