Election Day, Iran Receipts & The Outlook for Oil Production & Pricing – Top 3 Takeaways – March 10th, 2026
Takeaway #1: It’s Election Day
Today is Election Day for residents in 19 of Palm Beach County’s municipalities. From Boca Raton to the South and the Jupiter Inlet Colony to the north and Palm Beach to the east and Belle Glade to the west – just over 43% of the county’s population is in a municipality holding elections today. Somewhat sadly it would be huge news if even 43% of eligible voters in the 19 municipalities turned out to vote in the elections that help shape their communities. In the county’s four most recent municipal elections, here’s the turnout rate among eligible voters – 19%, 12%, 22% and 13%. There’s not a person living in any community that doesn’t have an opinion about how things should be (if you doubt me, ask your neighbors), yet somewhere between about one in ten to at best one in four eligible voters even make the effort to inform themselves and vote. The amount of apathy in local elections has always been remarkable to me. I’ve long shared my saying that every election has consequences, and it’s often those closest to you (in geography) that have the biggest impact on you...starting with those who live within an HOA (which anyone who’s ever lived within an intrusive HOA no doubt can attest to). If you’re part of the 43% with something to vote for in the Palm Beaches today, there’s still time to inform yourself and to get to your polling place today. If today turns out to be another typical municipal election day with only about 15% of people voting, which 15% of your community do you want to see making the decisions that impact it permanently? On that note, encouraging others who agree with you to vote is also a helpful thing.
Takeaway #2: Iran War Receipts
As for where we stand as we’ve entered day nine of the Iranian war. Here are the receipts for what’s been achieved by the joint U.S. and Israeli mission known as Operation Epic Fury as of Monday: 6,400 targets struck in Iran, 49 senior leaders killed – and Iran’s ballistic missile inventory having dropped from approximately 3,000 to approximately 2,000 – with 705 having been fired by Iran and the balanced having been +taken out on the ground. In total Iran had launched 2,820 attacks with only 31 that made it through allied defenses. So, what does this mean? It means that all of Iran’s top-level officials are believed to be dead – with the former Ayatollah’s son now installed as the new supreme leader. It means that only 1.1% of Iran’s attacks have breached allied defenses. It means that a third of Iran’s total missile inventory is gone. Most recently the Iran Revolutionary Guard is said to have taken to using Iranian citizens as shields, firing munitions from highly populated places, which has also shifted the focus of allied attacks to specific targets within the capital of Tehran. In other words, what this means is that the capacity for Iran to even keep going at this pace, all other factors remaining equal, appears to be no more than a matter of days. After the price of oil spiked to about $120 per barrel Sunday night into Monday morning, we quickly saw the price of oil back down to below $100, at around $86 most recently. Without any oil tankers moving through the Strait of Hormuz Iraq, Kuwait and the UAE have all cut oil production as they’re running out of capacity for storing harvested oil. The disruption in the Strait has been determined to be the largest overall disruption in oil supply historically. It remains to be seen if the spike above $100 to close to $120 was the peak of this event, but if it was and if there is resolution to at least tankers crossing through the Strait in coming days, as opposed to perhaps months, as some over the weekend feared –
Takeaway #3: We could see a rapid decline in the price of energy
Notably, as the massive disruption in the middle east is taking place, massive progress in Venezuela’s oil production is taking place. In my initial analysis of Venezuela’s oil outlook on January 7th in the wake of the Maduro ouster I mentioned this as Venezuela’s oil production had fallen to only about 900,000 barrels per day preceding the regime change... Short-term (1–2 years): Analysts estimate 1.4 million bpd is rather easily achievable with up to 2 million bpd in optimistic scenarios, by quickly ramping up existing operations – mainly by Chevron which is the lone U.S. company exporting Venezuelan oil. And that’s exactly what we’re on pace to see. Chevron has now announced that they’re on track to be able to increase production by 50% by the end of the year. With U.S. production already at record highs and rising, there’s the possibility that by the end of the year we’ll have record oil production that could lead to the lowest prices we’ve seen for gas since Trump’s first presidency. That’s the optimistic view of things, but it’s also a realistic possibility. There’s increasingly conversation that President Trump isn’t looking for total regime change in Iran but simply a government that will agree to act peacefully without pursuit of nuclear weapons. In other words, an outcome that’s similar to what we’ve seen in Venezuela. That may be easier said than done given the Islamic extremism of Iran’s mullahs, though all it takes is one supreme leader who believes it’s better to govern in peace than it is to be dead.