The average price of a gallon of gasoline hit $4 Tuesday for the first time since mid-2022, as the cost of oil surges due to the Iran war.

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In the month since the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the average price of unleaded gas has spiked more than a dollar a gallon. On Tuesday morning, the average price nationwide was $4.02 per gallon, motor club AAA said.

It’s not just retail gasoline. The diesel fuel used to power trucks delivering goods to stores, farm equipment and public transit has risen to $5.45 per gallon, more than $1.80 higher than it was a year ago.

Driving that is the soaring cost of crude oil worldwide. U.S West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude has risen more than 50% since the war began Feb. 28, while Brent, the international benchmark, has seen a jump of nearly 60%.

On Monday, U.S. crude oil settled above $100 per barrel for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Brent crude oil is poised to see its largest one-month increase on record.

Oil prices had already started rising before the Iran war began, fueled by fears that a conflict was imminent. Since the start of the year, the cost of U.S. crude oil is up more than 80% and Brent has skyrocketed almost 90%.

In response to strikes by the U.S. and Israel, Iran has effectively blocked shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical channel off its southern coast. Tehran has also attacked its Gulf Arab neighbors, who are major oil producers.

Typically, more than 20% of the world’s oil supply moves through the waterway. But Iran has repeatedly threatened to attack ships if they move through the strait without permission or if they’re associated with the U.S. or Israel. Several tankers have been hit.

As a result, many tankers are stranded in the Persian Gulf, unable to deliver their products to markets.

Some tankers have been allowed to pass through the strait, including one associated with India and three associated with China. But overall traffic through the waterway is down more than 90% in March.

During the first 28 days of the war, a total of only 55 to 60 tankers have cleared the Strait of Hormuz, according to the ship tracking website TankerTrackers.

Before the war, more than 100 ships per day made the passage, it said.

“This rise in gasoline spending could potentially dampen consumers’ ability to spend on ‘nice-to-have’ or discretionary categories,” Bank of America economists recently wrote.

This year, the average U.S. household will spend an additional $740 on gas because of the jump in oil prices, according to economists from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

“The consumer has already seen the sticker shock from rising gasoline prices and increased airline ticket prices from the rising cost of jet fuel,” longtime industry analyst Andy Lipow said. “However, the full effects of the higher diesel prices has yet to be felt and that will flow through the economy over the next few months.”

As American consumers adjust to higher gas prices, oil dependent nations in Europe and Asia are already facing much more severe energy shocks. Inflation, oil and gas rationing and sharp pullbacks in economic growth estimates are impacting billions of people worldwide.

WASHINGTON — House and Senate Republican leaders jointly announced a plan Wednesday that they said would end the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security that caused major airport delays.

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“In the coming days, Republicans in the Senate and House will be following through on the President’s directive by fully funding the entire Department of Homeland Security on two parallel tracks: through the appropriations process and through the reconciliation process,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said in a statement.

The two leaders were vague about the exact plan, but it appears to closely resemble the Senate’s preferred path from Friday.

Johnson and Thune heavily implied that it would be for the Senate to, once again, pass a bill it approved unanimously last week, which it could try to do as early as Thursday.

It would fund all of DHS except ICE and Customs and Border Protection, which Democrats won’t agree to fund without reforms to immigration enforcement operations. Those two agencies already have separate funding.

House Republican leaders trashed that bill and rejected it Friday, but they now appear ready to back down and accept the Senate plan. They would have to vote to pass it through the House.

GOP leadership had no immediate comment on the timing for a vote. Both chambers are scheduled to be on recess until April 13.

Then Republicans would fund ICE and CBP in a separate party-line “budget reconciliation” bill that could bypass a filibuster and get approved without any Democratic votes. The timing for that is even less clear.

Johnson and Thune said the “two-track” plan would “fully reopen the Department, make sure all federal workers are paid, and specifically fund immigration enforcement and border security for the next three years so that those law-enforcement activities can continue uninhibited.”

A White House official told NBC News that the administration supports the Johnson-Thune plan.

Earlier Wednesday, President Donald Trump called on Republicans to pass the party-line bill “no later than June 1st.” He threw the earlier plans to reopen DHS into chaos last week when he declined to comment on the Senate bill, which led House Republicans to reject it.

DHS has been shut down for more than a month, with employees for the TSA, FEMA and other agencies going for weeks without pay. Trump signed an executive order last week to pay TSA employees, but the legality and length of that plan are murky. Thousands of civilian Coast Guard employees and other DHS workers are still not being paid.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., slammed Republicans for having “derailed a bipartisan agreement” for days, “making American families pay the price for their dysfunction.”

“Throughout this fight, Senate Democrats never wavered. We were clear from the start: fund critical security, protect Americans, and no blank check for reckless ICE and Border Patrol enforcement,” he said Wednesday. “We were united, held the line, and refused to let Republican chaos win.”

On Friday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said, “House Democrats are prepared to support the bill to end the Trump-Republican shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, make sure TSA agents are paid, stand up for FEMA and for the Coast Guard, for our cyber security professionals, and stop inconveniencing Americans.”

Stocks surged Tuesday, with the S&P 500 closing up 2.9% while the Nasdaq rose 3.8% and the Dow gained 1,125 points.

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But this very good day capped off what was a very bad month for U.S. equities. The S&P 500 fell 5.09% in March, and the Nasdaq Composite declined 4.75%.

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the near-total blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow, Iranian controlled waterway through which a fifth of the world’s crude oil typically transits every day, weighed heavily on markets throughout the month.

Tuesday was also the end of the first quarter of the year, one when the S&P 500 and Nasdaq posted their worst annual starts since 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine rocked markets.

For the first quarter, the S&P 500 dropped 4.6% and the Nasdaq declined 7.1%.

Oil prices, meanwhile, soared over the past month, driving up the cost of fuel and triggering a domino effect of higher prices around the globe.

Brent, the international oil benchmark, posted its largest monthly percentage increase ever, after having risen more than 60%. The price of U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude oil also soared in March, climbing more than 50% in its biggest one-month gain since 2020.

For millions of drivers in the U.S., the increases manifest as higher prices for gas. And here, too, the past month was remarkable. The average price of unleaded gasoline hit $4 per gallon Tuesday, up more than 34% in just four weeks.

But it’s not just gas prices that hit U.S. households this month.

More than half of all adults in the U.S. own stocks, often via their retirement accounts and the broader funds those managed accounts invest in. Most of the time, market moves up and down don’t swing the value of those kinds of diversified retirement accounts.

But March was a different story.

“Stocks have been following the lead of oil prices at an unprecedented rate over the last several weeks, and if the U.S. just walked away from the Middle East with the Strait still blockaded, energy markets would likely remain incredibly supply-constrained, keeping prices high,” analysts at Bespoke Investment Group wrote Tuesday.

“The longer prices are high and supplies are limited, the worse it’s going to be for the global economy and ultimately stock prices,” they added.

The wild market swings of the second Trump administration are in sharp contrast to how Donald Trump said the markets would react if he were elected to a second term in 2024.

“There are many people that are saying that the only reason the Stock Market is high is because I am leading in all of the Polls, and if I don’t win, we will have a CRASH of similar proportions to 1929,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in May 2024 as he campaigned for the presidency.

Shortly after he was re-elected in 2024, Trump was asked whether he believed market indexes were good barometers of his performance in office. “To me … all of it together, it’s very important,” he told CNBC.

But during the first 14 months of his second term, U.S. markets have faced some of the sharpest drawdowns in history.

In February and March of last year, Trump’s sweeping tariff policies roiled the market, pushing the S&P 500 into its seventh-fastest correction of all time. A correction is when a stock or an index declines 10% from its most recent record high.

Just over a year later, the S&P 500 isn’t far from doing it again. As of Tuesday’s closing bell, the index had tumbled 6.7% from its most recent high in January.

As oil prices rise, stocks typically fall given that higher oil prices typically lead to higher prices across a number of industry sectors over the long run.

Already, inflation is on the rise around the world. On Tuesday morning, eurozone inflation came in at 2.5%, from 1.9% the month before, according to the European Central Bank.

On Tuesday, the Nikkei 225 in Japan recorded its worst month since 2008. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 index posted its worst month since 2022.

Two near-corrections in just over a year illustrates just how volatile the administration’s policies have been for markets.

Still, since Trump took office for a second time, the S&P 500 is up 8%, although last year global stocks far outpaced the broad U.S. index.

In 2025, global stocks as measured by the MSCI ACWI ex USA index rose nearly 30%, while U.S. stocks rose just 16%. Global stocks haven’t beaten American equities by that much during the first year of a presidential term since 1993, according to data from Bloomberg.

In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly touted the Dow’s recent 50,000 milestone as a sign that the markets are doing well in his presidency.

“You know, it’s sort of crazy, I hit 50,000 on the Dow,” Trump said at an investment conference in Florida on Friday. “People said that wouldn’t be possible within four years.”

“And then we hit 7,000 on the S&P,” Trump added. “People said that’s even harder than hitting 50,000 on the Dow.”

As of Tuesday, the Dow had plunged more than 3,600 points since it hit 50,000, a drop of nearly 7.5%.

The grandson of the inventor of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, who has publicly criticized The Hershey Company for tinkering with the classic formula in its spinoff products, appears to have gotten some sweet revenge.

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The candy company has announced that it will return to using “classic milk and dark chocolate recipes” in all its Reese’s and Hershey’s products by 2027.

“If this is true, the people who deserve the credit are the loyal fans who were alarmed by what Hershey was doing,” Brad Reese told NBC News on Wednesday. “But I am seeing a lot of red flags here. I think what Hershey is trying to do here is change with PR narrative.”

Reese, whose demands that Hershey stop skimping on chocolate went viral in February, said he trusts his taste buds more than he trusts the company that produces iconic candies that bear his family name.

“If something like the Valentine’s Day Reese’s Mini Heart still doesn’t taste like real milk chocolate next year, I’ll know they’re lying,” he said.

Hershey CEO Kirk Tanner made the announcement on Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg.

“We’re going to make some small investments to really align the portfolio to what the brand stands for,” Tanner said. “That consistency is important across the brand.”

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups have been made with the same ingredients since 1928 — milk chocolate and peanut butter.

Starting next year, Tanner said candies inspired by the originals — like the “mini Reese’s cups and shapes,” as well as the Reese’s Fast Break candy bar — will also be made with real milk chocolate instead of a chocolate compound coating.

In addition, all the classic Hershey’s chocolate bars will also be made with “pure milk and dark chocolate,” he said. And Hershey is “enhancing” the Kit Kat candy bar “for a creamier taste and texture.”

In all, the company said the shift from chocolate compound coatings to the real thing will affect less than 3% of the Reese’s products and a tiny portion of Hershey’s products.

And Hershey is “on track” to remove all artificial colors from its products by the end of next year, the company said.

Tanner, in the Bloomberg interview, also insisted that the switch back to real chocolate was in the works long before Reese went public with his complaints.

“Right when I started with the company, we did a deep dive across our portfolio,” said Tanner, who joined the firm in August 2025.

Reese scoffed at that claim from Tanner.

“You know when this became an issue?” he asked. “Valentine’s Day. This has been going on since Valentine’s Day.”

Reese began taking Hershey to task after discovering that the company had replaced the milk chocolate with a chocolate-flavored coating on some of its Reese’s-inspired products, like the Valentine’s Day Reese’s Mini Hearts.

Infuriated, Reese posted a link to a letter of complaint he wrote to Todd Scott, who does the corporate branding for Hershey, on his LinkedIn page.

Reese invoked the name of his grandfather H.B. Reese, who created the iconic peanut butter cup in 1928 and started a candy company that produced them until 1963. Hershey has been making them ever since.

“My grandfather,” Reese wrote, “built REESE’S on a simple, enduring architecture: Milk Chocolate + Peanut Butter.”

But Hershey, he wrote, has replaced the original formula “with compound coatings and Peanut Butter with peanut-butter style cremes across multiple REESE’S products.”

That letter went viral.

Hershey insisted that the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups were made the same way they had always been. But the company also conceded that, as it expanded its “Reese’s product line,” it had tinkered with the original recipe.

Right now, the Reese’s Mini Eggs that are a staple at Easter celebrations do not contain milk chocolate, according to their labels.

Neither do Reese’s Pieces, which were introduced in 1978 and became a sensation after they were featured in the 1982 movie “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”

In response to an NBC News request for a full list of Reese’s and Hershey’s products that will return to using “classic milk and dark chocolate recipes,” the company released a statement that reiterated much of what Tanner said earlier.

“The core recipes for our Hershey’s chocolate bars and Reese’s peanut butter cups have not changed,” it said in part.

American flyers still smarting from interminable airport security lines are about to get another shock.

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A looming global jet fuel shortage is expected to hike the cost of air travel and reduce flight schedules, as airlines look to offset rising prices.

On Monday, JetBlue announced it was raising baggage fees, citing “rising operating costs.”

“While we recognize that fee increases are never ideal, we take careful consideration to ensure these changes are implemented only when necessary,” the carrier said.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said costs to passengers have already been increasing. Data from flight information group OAG shows average airfares in the past week reached $465, the highest price point for the same period since at least 2019.

“We have to raise prices to deal with higher fuel prices,” Kirby acknowledged at a company event last week in Los Angeles. In a subsequent memo, he added: “It may be a challenge to continue passing through much of the increased fuel price if oil stays higher for longer.”

The rising prices are the latest example of the economic fallout from the war with Iran. Analysts have started warning that the full toll has only begun to be accounted for as the global economy absorbs the loss of critical energy exports out of the region due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and damage to other key energy infrastructure sites in the region. On Tuesday, U.S. gasoline prices hit $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022 amid surging oil prices. Major stock indexes, meanwhile, have fallen by nearly 10% since the start of the war.

In the case of air travel, the industry is facing jet fuel prices that have surged 85% in the U.S. since the day before the war began in February, according to data from Argus published by the industry group Airlines for America. On Monday, they hit a record $4.62 a gallon.

Most U.S. carriers no longer hedge fuel costs, said Henry Harteveldt, president of Atmosphere Research Group. So they are forced to pass on some costs to passengers.

While U.S. carriers largely source jet fuel domestically, countries in Asia and Europe that are more reliant on Middle East stocks have begun signaling they are taking unprecedented measures to conserve jet fuel. In South Korea, carriers have requested that the government help redirect fuel stocks bound for export back to local markets.

The Financial Times reported Monday that the U.K. was also facing an acute shortage, with no Britain-bound cargoes visible on the water as transit through the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked. Some foreign carriers have begun charging fuel surcharges of as much as $150.

As overseas carriers begin looking to alternative supply bases, the cost for a global commodity like jet fuel rises across the board.

“It shocks the entire mechanism,” said Jaime Brito, an executive director at Oil Price Information Service consultancy.

President Donald Trump commented on the jet fuel shortages Tuesday morning, though he did not mention their impact on U.S. travelers.

“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Airlines are also signaling capacity cuts to cope with rising costs. United will drop about 5% of planned flights in mostly “off-peak periods” — like red-eye and midweek routes — during the second and third quarters of 2026 to further mitigate the cost increases.

“We’re certainly going to be nimble in terms of capacity to make sure that supply and demand stay in balance,” American Airlines CEO Robert Isom said at a JPMorgan conference earlier this month.

Kyle Potter, executive editor of the Thrifty Traveler, said most carriers have quietly been raising airfares since the Iran war began. He said airlines typically move in droves when making pricing decisions, so it is likely that other carriers may also soon begin raising baggage fees or seek other forms of ancillary revenue. Potter noted that unlike airfares, revenues from these fees are not subject to federal excise taxes.

As a result, the fees — unlike airfares — are unlikely to come back down assuming jet fuel prices recover.

Representatives for five other major U.S. carriers did not respond to a request for comment.

The acute fuel price increase comes as air travel demand has remained steady, with January and February ticket sales at or near records. While investors have taken airline stocks down some 25% since the start of the Iran war, Kirby said that customers appear willing to keep booking thanks to healthy demand even if airfare rises.

“The number of wealthy Americans who are traveling is bigger and wealthier than ever, and that is what much of the airline industry is relying on right now,” Potter said. “And that means they’re more immune to higher fees, higher fares and just getting turned off by negative news about travel.”

President Donald Trump said Sunday that he would like to “take the oil in Iran” and is considering seizing the export hub of Kharg Island, which is responsible for more than 90% of Iran’s oil exports.

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In an interview with the Financial Times, Trump said his “preference would be to take the oil.”

“To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: ‘Why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people,” he said.

The interview marks some of Trump’s most direct comments about his thinking on what to do with Iran’s oil.

In an interview with NBC News this month, Trump sidestepped answering whether he had plans to try to take Iran’s oil.

“You look at Venezuela,” he said. “People have thought about it, but it’s too soon to talk about that.”

In January, the U.S. captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and proceeded to take more control over the country’s oil industry.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday night.

Trump told the Financial Times on Sunday that the U.S. has “a lot of options,” including potentially taking Kharg Island, a rare island made of hard coral off Iran.

“Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t. We have a lot of options,” Trump said. “It would also mean we had to be there [in Kharg Island] for a while.”

Oil prices have skyrocketed around the globe as the war continues, with U.S. crude oil costing over $100 a barrel Sunday.

Thousands more U.S. troops are heading to the Middle East, with the USS Tripoli arriving on Saturday as part of a complement of 3,500 troops. But Trump and his administration continue to signal that they are working to negotiate a 15-point proposal to end the war.

Trump declined Sunday to offer specific details about whether a ceasefire deal could be reached in the coming days to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway used to move about 20% of the world’s oil exports.

“We’ve got about 3,000 targets left — we’ve bombed 13,000 targets — and another couple of thousand targets to go,” Trump said in the Financial Times interview. “A deal could be made fairly quickly.”