No. 03 · Oil · Strait of Hormuz
Half the oil is moving. The diesel is what’s broken.
The strait is carrying 48% of its normal flow, not the “two-thirds” officials describe. And what put diesel at $6.53 is the $2.38 a gallon sitting between crude and the pump. Six claims checked.
48%
Of normal flow through the Strait of Hormuz
$6.53
US average diesel, up $2.78 on the year
$2.38
Refining margin per gallon — it was $0.52 before the conflict
11m
Barrels a day missing; no proposed remedy covers half of it
The finding in one chart
What each proposed remedy can actually deliver
Million barrels a day, against a gap of 11 — and all of them are crude
SOURCES: EIA · US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
Issues
No. 03 · Oil · Strait of Hormuz
Half the oil is moving. The diesel is what’s broken.
Ten million barrels a day is 48% of normal, not two-thirds. The reserve, record US production and the bypass pipelines are all crude remedies, and the shortage setting the price is distillate.
No. 02 · Social Security
Social Security isn’t going broke. It’s scheduled to cut itself.
A tax law sold as helping retirees moved their cut closer. The largest driver of this year’s worse outlook is falling birth rates; the second is lower immigration.
No. 01 · US–Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund
One side started accruing in 2025. The other starts in 2039.
Ukraine assigned half the state’s take from every deposit it has not yet developed. US military assistance converts into partnership capital automatically; Ukraine’s side pays nothing until a mine produces.
About
First Loss takes one agreement or one public claim at a time and works out what it obliges, what it pays, and who absorbs the loss when the assumptions fail. Every claim is held to the same standard regardless of who is making it: what does the document say?
I’m a mortgage lender by trade — VP of Mortgage Lending, working mostly in Non-QM, where the job is reading a term sheet, working out what it pays when things go wrong, and explaining that to someone who has to decide. The zeroes are different here; the discipline is not.
Models are published alongside the analysis. If a figure is wrong, the input that produced it is available and you can show me. — Jake Bowser, jake@firstloss.org
- The ledger. Every obligation or claim tied to the line of the document that settles it.
- The model. Reproducible, every input sourced and dated, published alongside.
- The waterfall. Who is paid in what order, and who absorbs the first loss.
- Downside cases. Where reserves run dry and what happens on that day.
- The menu. What would change the outcome, and how big each change has to be.
- Unknowns register. What could not be determined, and what would resolve it.