Fuel chaos continues from coast to coast pain at the pump.
The Philippines still don't have the storage facilities.
“Lots of people queueing to fill up in Slovenia.”
It's well-business support from the BBC World Service. This is Andrew Peach on the way, the impact of the war in the Middle East on prices in the Philippines, Slovenia, Kenya and Australia. Also today how traders bet hundreds of millions of dollars on falling oil prices just before President Trump caught off strikes on the energy infrastructure in Iran.
And a row over the cost of tickets to see the World Cup. Start over in the Philippines, where the government has declared a national energy emergency. The President, Ferdinand Markov's junior, says supplying the country is an imminent danger with fuel prices continuing to surge across the world because of the war in the Middle East.
John and Tawari spoke to us for a petrol station in the capital Manila. The price of diesel and petrol is more than double now. And there's really a few nations that are more exposed to the disruption to oil supplies. So what does the Executive Order mean?
“Well, it allows the government to oversee the orderly distribution of fuel, food, medicine,”
and other essential goods.
There were some fears about wording of food supplies, for example, and this means that the government can have a bit more control. It also means that the government can buy fuel and petroleum products to try and shore up supplies. You know, the Philippines is still developing economy, although it is doing relatively well,
but they still don't have the storage facilities that are more developed economy might have when it comes to fuel. The government's role does a series of subsidies to try and help people with the higher cost of fuel. The interesting thing is with these emergency measures, the government could have a bit
more control over the pricing, because here in the Philippines is a completely free market. It's the private companies that actually set the price. This will give the government a little bit more leeway to be able to control things.
Elsewhere in the world, Slovenia has become the first EU country to announce fuel rationing.
That's because of what's being called fuel tourism with the price that cheaper than in surrounding countries, Guided Lorne is in the capital. We've had lots of people coming in from over the border in Austria, queuing to fill up at petrol stations in Slovenia. As a result of that, there have been some shortages and the government has now moved to impose
restrictions on the amount the drivers can fill up. So they're saying you can only fill up 50 litres per day per motorist, and that's your lot. Businesses do get an allowance of 200 litres per day. But what this is trying to do is just demonstrate to people that they shouldn't be stockpiling.
What the government doesn't want seeing happening has been happening previously, as people turning up with Jerry Cans or even enormous plastic fuel tanks. And it's not just oil and gas prices impacted in Kenya. The flower industry is one of the country's top earners, but cancels flights to the Middle East have disrupted sales of flowers.
Jay Hirani is from Primeroza Flaus. They do buy up and up its airspace, and customers start sending us orders because they see confirmations from airlines that they have flight departure, and they give us an order. So we park and deliver the flowers to the airport. So once we've delivered the flowers, their customers come back to us and tell us the flight
has been cancelled already. And they ask us to collect the boxes back from the airport, meaning it's not a sale any longer. It goes back to a shredder machine, and it goes back to the compost. I'm assuming the losses on a daily basis, or a one farm could be anywhere between $22,000
per day. Next to Australia, which might be a producer of oil and gas, but that hasn't stopped a 50% increase in the price of petrol since January.
From coast to coast, paying at the pump, drivers navigate prices they've never paid before.
Nation's truckies are tonight at breaking point, warning their businesses will go bust if they don't pass on rising fuel costs. More than 160 petrol stations across Victoria have now run out of fuel. Australia imports around 80% of its petrol and diesel, so motorists are worried. I've been talking to Professor Lyurand Amelo, who's an energy expert who teaches at Mcquarie
University in Sydney asked him if Australia's motors were right to be panicking.
“Yes, and no, because I think fuel supplies coming into Australia, I think the problem”
is that the supply is not getting to the petrol stations on time.
The wholesale cost of fuel has gone up a fair bit, particularly diesel.
I think it's now around $2.90 a liter, so there's not much margin about that, so that's
“why these are really about $3.00 at a lot of petrol stations.”
So it's a supply chain issue. The Australian government tells us that there's run 80 shipments of refined fuel that comes to our shores, but in fact, in March, we expected to have around 97 shipments of fuel, so there's well above what the government's telling us.
The crucial thing is people are worried what's going to happen beyond, you know, media
fraud to end of April, if the war continues. So prices are one thing and people in many countries are experiencing the high prices, but it's an actual physical lack of supply and Australia, and it's that just because so much of Australia's fuel is imported. Australia has probably one of the countries that's probably the worst of, even if you look at some of the other emerging markets or developing countries, we have kind of, I want
to say, self-inflicted, but it's an issue that's been neglected. I know that refineries have
“shut down, but I think there was not an option, but to shut those refineries down, because”
Australia just ran out of oil. And in terms of what the government can do, one thing it is doing is relaxing restrictions on fuel, which comes from oil refineries in Australia, relaxing environmental restrictions in Australia is the situation. Yeah, look, Australia is fairly new to the so-called clean fuel agenda. We use almost a decade fuel that was anywhere between 150
parts per million of South for dark side to 50 parts per million South for dark side.
So the 10 parts per million South for dark side requirements only kicked in in December 2025. So even if the fuel comes in at 50 parts per million, we need to take all that. So people have to realise that you can't put your climate change and your environmentalist hat on when the situation is dying. And it won't take long in any country for high fuel
“prices to really annoy people. And then before a few days of gone by,”
their annoyance is directed at their own government's leadership, even if everyone knows really that the Australian government hasn't got an awful lot to do with the situation. I don't think we're going to see a huge uproar over here. Hopefully on the demand side, people are also a bit more sensible and don't drive unnecessarily, you know, with the Easter break coming up, Australia's love to be out on the road and out to the bad.
As do most people in other countries. So we need to ensure that the demand drops off a bit as well. I mean, what the government has kind of failed over here is on transparency. You cannot store refined fuels for multiple years, but you can definitely store crude oil in the ground because that's where the oil comes from. And this sort of storage, the government has to rethink whether we become a regional strategic reserve holder for the Asia Pacific and we have some sort of
a cooperation in building an oil reserve over here. But I know that that's going to run into a brick wall because there'll be some opposition to that. That was Professor Lyur and Demela with me from Sydney. Now, the market prices have oil and gas have been volatile to say the least over the last couple of weeks. We're talking on yesterday's program about the big swings in prices after President Trump's surprise traders with the announcement that talks what underway with Iran.
It's now made observe that just before that announcement, some huge bets were placed on oil prices falling, making someone some pretty good money in a 15-minute period. Could it have been someone who knew what was coming? Well, trading on inside information isn't legal, of course. George Steer of the Financial Times is in New York. He's been writing about this and told my colleague Evan Davis, what was unusual about that trading on Monday? So yesterday about 27 seconds before
650 a.m. Eastern time. Anyone with market data in front of them can see that there was a big jump in trading activity in oil derivatives, specifically futures tied to Brent Crude and WTI, the US oil benchmark. So about 6,000 oil contracts changed hands over the next two minutes and there was a sharp uptick and there was no obvious catalyst at that point. We couldn't find any other potentially market moving headlines that might have prompted investors suddenly buy oil. So oil, we don't know
who was trading or how many traders were involved, but the total value of the oil contracts traded
over those two minutes came to about $600 million. About 15 minutes after that, at about 704,
Donald Trump said on social that the US had held productive talks with Iran about ending the war and oil prices plunged as a result and the bets had been on oil prices plunging, not on oil prices going up. The oil price had been falling ever so slightly during that two-minute burst of activity,
It's hard to say he was buying a selling and how many people were involved as...
Now obviously it would be easy to say I'm going to join this dot to that dot and someone must have been on an insider information and they were betting and they were making money out of it. No one's actually come up with any evidence for that. But the real question is how one usual was
“that market move just prior to President Trump's post or was that within a normal day's business?”
Yeah exactly. It's very hard to prove cause Alice who you have zero evidence that anyone was tipped off about the President's post and people can make big trades at any time of day for a
million different reasons. We don't know how much anyone profited either. But it was at a
sleepy time of day. There wasn't anything else going on that we could see. There weren't any other big headlines and I think a lot of the people who spoke with us, some hedge fund, traders and portfolio managers, they also said it was an unusually large trade for that time of day. I think the White House have said they wouldn't tolerate anybody using inside information. They told us yes they don't tolerate any administration official illegally profiteering off
inside a knowledge and that any implication that officials are engaged in such activity without
“evidence is baseless and irresponsible. Who would actually be regulating that in the US right now?”
I mean who would who's job would it be to investigate? It's a good question. There are two big US regulatory bodies that oversee financial markets. The securities and exchange commission and the commodity futures trading commission. Both of these bodies are now led by Trump appointees who think they're Biden or predecessors were heavy handed and overly prescriptive. Trump's appointee at the CFTC has kind of rolled out the red carpet for the prediction markets where earlier the
year old of people were making some very well-timed bets on US attacks on Iran and Venezuela and the SEC, the main regulator, the head of enforcement resigned very abruptly last week. The last remaining Democrat on the SEC said in December and I quote that the darkest steps of winters still lie ahead for America's capital markets. So there's been this deregulatory kind of push under Trump all of which to say that it's probably unlikely that we'll see an investigation
into Monday morning's trades. George Stier in New York, let's talk to Jennifer Snider now from Brighton Securities in Rochester, New York. Jennifer, any thoughts on that on this like weird
“movement of trade hundreds of millions of dollars of trade before seven in the morning?”
Well, a couple of things come to mind. The first is that when you see those big shifts, usually they are the bigger hedge funds. The institutional funds behind those movements. The firms like Black Rock or Vanguard or State Street, those ones, they control the markets at the end of the day. We know this. And when you come back to retail investors, what we saw happen was the price is fall. And the
fall out, the ripple effect is that it is positive done for the retail investors. But the bottom line
is oil is everything right now. And markets are trading oil first everything second. And we're really in this headline driven burst, the pattern that we're seeing is more escalation and the stocks are going down, diplomacy hints and the stocks are bouncing. So it's really this geopolitical market versus being a fed market, essentially energy and more headlines versus earnings in data. And after the wild ride of Monday's markets, we're back with the oil over $100 a barrel again now.
What are you saying to your clients about what to do about investing? So oil is still the thermostat of this global economy. And it's I'm really just telling people to stay calm, to not panic. The Middle East is swinging these prices with every headline that comes out. So we think of it this way. Adam Smith talked about the invisible hand. But now in 2026, that hand has a social media account. And right now, it's moving markets in real time.
Okay. And we talk a lot on this program about how business like certainties, retail clients, like certainties, at your cost traders, make their money out of uncertainty, don't they? About out of calling it. Certainly, there is that piece, especially talking on the derivatives
of what we see possibly options. That's a little bit, I would say, third, fourth layer in investing.
And it can definitely be inside the bigger 401k's or retirement plans and things of that nature. And at the end of the day, looking at the companies that make up S&P 500 NASDAQ, all those indexes, those companies want to make profits. They want the research development. We want success. So fundamentally, they're sound. It really is this reaction from a headline to a headline that we're seeing that is really driving everyone crazy with what's going to happen next, that uncertainty,
that volatility. And some people can play into that to win. Jennifer, thank you very much. This is well-business support from the BBC World Service with Andrew Pitch.
Now, the Trump administration says it'll pay the French energy giant total,
nearly a billion dollars to cancel plans to build wind farms off the East Coast of the US.
“Donald Trump, of course, scores offshore wind projects and has moved to scrap sustainable energy sources”
and increase fossil fuel production. At a new conference, Patrick Piano, who's the chief executive of total explain how the funds would now be used. The idea is to release these two concessions back to the government. We'll get the dollar per dollar. We invested exactly 928 million dollars in vis-a-lice to get the lease, which will be a group. And we'll be the reinvest them this year in 2006 to accelerate some projects in particular in energy in US and
the US and terrorist secretary. Doug Bergam said total would invest the reimbursement conventional fuel plant elsewhere in the US. Lena Moffitt is from the Climate Activist Organization Green Action. I spoke to Lena little earlier. She says she believes the deal with total, so he's president
“Trump helping out his financial backers. What he is doing is ensuring that the oil and gas”
executives who helped get him elected are going to keep reaping in incredible profits.
Well, the rest of us in American ratepayers pay incredibly high energy prices. Total says they will invest the value of the leases into more oil and natural gas production, all of which is designed to meet the energy needs of the US consumer and bring prices down. Well, US LNG exports are actually raising prices for US consumers. The more we send our LNG to the rest of the world to try and keep the rest of the planet addicted to our oil and gas,
the higher prices are going in the United States. Well, the shift in the US from renewables to fossil fuels has been clear since Donald Trump returned to the White House elsewhere in the
“world. The momentum is in the opposite direction. Dave Jones is co-founder of Emma Energy,”
Global Energy Think Tank. He's been an electricity analyst for 25 years. He's live with us
on World Business Report now. What you'll take on what's happening in the US first of all,
where companies are being paid huge sums of public money to stop projects that previous presidents had encouraged. Yeah, it's a bit of a crazy situation because electricity demand is rising within the United States. It's a bit of an all-hands-on-deck situation for getting as much electricity as possible. So you take offshore wind-out that equation and then on top of that solar project, it's also been cancelled. I'd make a project and call there's Melda Savage in
Nevada, which was six gigawatts of solar. Got cancelled as well. Then suddenly you're left with much fewer choices. And in the US, it's really a massive issue. And really it's only consumers that stand to lose from this decision. One of the rising biggest rising advisors in electricity demand is from data centers and now kind of almost isolated from this being forced to use gas, which is a crazy situation when there's much cheaper alternatives out there. But if we leave
environmental concerns to one side, that's a huge factor. If we park that, if you invest the same huge money in increased fossil fuel production, why is the less electricity? Because in the case of the US you can't get those, there's a few backlogs in gas turbine suppliers. So you can't get those to to market quick enough so there's actually kind of a short point to apply, there's happening in real time at the moment. But in when you look outside of the US,
so within the US, you know, women and solar do have a bit of an advantage on fossil fuels outside of the US. It's a very different situation. It's even more extreme. Where countries are importing oil and gas, they're paying much higher prices than you have within the United States. Renewal was also cheaper. It's not subject to the tariffs. The US has on imported clean energy products. And what that means is that that price advantage outside of the US is really quite pertinent.
Three quarters of the world's population live in countries that are imported as a fossil fuels. So the US is a bit of an exception to the rest of the world from that perspective and or where that decision looks a little bit marginal within the US about renewables versus fossil outside of the US. It's very clear. It's in pay for clean energy. And the trend has been in that direction based on the environment based on cost for quite a while. And just in the last three weeks,
that the issue of energy security has pushed people even more towards renewables because it
Throws into sharp focus the fact that suddenly we're able to rely on imports ...
world that might be in difficulty. Absolutely. And everyone's kind of struggling around looking
“for those ticking blasters around that crisis here and now, but really there are solutions.”
There are long-term solutions to this. So the amount of LNG gas that was exported through the straight of hundreds last year in energy terms, if that was petrary gas per plants, that's equal just to one year's rise last year's rise in solar generation. When you look at how much electric vehicles that were on the road at the end of last year, how much oil it's displaced, they displaced about 70% of Iran's exports from last year. So already you've got those solutions
that are in place that are working today that can help a million situation, 90% of those oil
and gas exports out of the straight of pumice last year went into Asia countries and on the on the program, just now you were talking about the Philippines, take from emergency, the amount's there.
“We think it's kind of comitable of this is that this is Asia's Ukraine moment.”
When you create the foundation happen that you double doubt on what they've been used to when doing, which was building clean energy, starting that process of electrification. And now for the first time you've got so many Asian countries that 60% of the world's population live virtually all of the fossil fuel import is there. Thank you so much for that analysis. We're going to move on now, but thank you for today Jones from Amber Energy. Now a group representing
supporters has filed a formal complaint against FIFA, the governing body will football over ticket prices for this summer's World Cup in North America. Football supporters Europe telling the European Commission of FIFA is abusing its monopoly, FIFA saying it's focusing on fair access to matches. I've been talking to Victor Matheson, professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. Rather than setting ticket prices at a set level and then just seeing
what happens with the number of tickets sold is a ticket seller will monitor demand of tickets and will adjust the prices in real time depending on whether people are actually buying those tickets. Some people think that's unfair, but it's certainly the same sort of system that applies to hotel rooms say it will people want them they're more expensive. Right, so this is just markets and action. It is certainly beneficial to FIFA and not beneficial to at least a certain portion of consumers out there,
but the reality is with the World Cup there's a lot more people who want tickets than there are
“tickets available at low prices and so the question is how do you allocate those tickets?”
Most economists say allocating those tickets by price is certainly as good a way as other things like random lottery or by people lining up in a queue. Also, it's about where the money's going. People are arguing today that FIFA should be thinking about loyal football fans and not pricing them out of the market, but FIFA would say this money's going to promote football around the world and countries where that otherwise may not happen. Certainly some of the money goes that way, but FIFA is an
awfully difficult organization to defend. A large portion of the money will be going to the players themselves. It seems reasonable if you're entertaining us in that World Cup final, obviously the players should have a portion of that and a bunch of it does go to grassroots soccer all across the world, but it's hard to feel a whole lot of pity on on FIFA and the fact that this is a way to basically double or triple the amount of a ticket revenue they're going to generate in this World Cup
compared to four years ago. A lot of people from other countries are just looking at the actual ticket prices and thinking that's a lot, but easy to load compared to other big sporting events in the
US. Certainly not a lot compared to other big sporting events in the US, but the reality is it's
far more expensive than we've seen for World Cup in the past. For example, the last time the World Cup was in the United States 1994, you could get a category a opening ticket to the opening match for about $100. That'd be about $200 in today's money. I was actually at that opening game that ticket I bought for $100. I was amazed how much that was at the time, but of course that is a fraction of what even the cheapest tickets were going for this time. Those same tickets were going for four
times as much even before dynamic ticket pricing kicked in this time. So there's no doubt that the
World Cup is a much more expensive and a much more luxurious experience this ...
years ago when it came to the US. We're talking about legal challenges. Do you think anyone's
“going to tell FIFA to change any of this? The one legal challenge that is reasonable from a monopoly”
standpoint is officially FIFA wants all ticket resales to go through their own ticket reselling service
which they are taking a 30 percent cut-up. So that is obviously monopolistic practice. That being said
“if FIFA is simply just selling tickets in the first place for the amount that people are willing”
to pay, it's hard to argue that there is any sort of economic principle being violated here.
And that was Victor Matheson Professor of Economics at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts.
“And that's it from this edition of World Business Report. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you”
get your podcasts from and you can also get the daily edition of World Business Express bringing you the latest money and work news every weekday. From me, Andrew Peach and the team, thank you for being with us here on the BBC World Service.
