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THE WAR ON IRAN HAS MADE THE RICH EVEN RICHER  
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Ben Balint-Kurti
June 25, 2026
Jacobin
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_ Over 50% of the profits from recent oil supply shocks went to the
top 1% of Americans. The bottom half received just 1%. The Iran war
likely triggered another massive transfer to the very richest. _

ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods at Milken Institute's Global Conference.
The conference explored various topics, from the rise of generative AI
to electric vehicle trends and featured participants Elon Musk, soccer
star David Beckham, actor Ashton Kutcher., Apu Gomes / Getty Images)

 

The recent war in Iran has triggered a massive global oil shock.
Virtually everyone on the planet relies on oil, or on products that
require it, which means virtually everyone is now paying more for the
basics of daily life. It feels like the rare crisis that hurts
everyone equally.

It doesn’t. New research from economists Gregor Semieniuk, Isabella
Weber, and colleagues uses financial forensics to show exactly how
supply shocks funnel money upward: over 50% of the profits from the
COVID and Ukraine-related supply shocks of 2021 and 2022 went to the
top 1% of the US wealth distribution. The bottom 50% received just 1%.
There is every reason to believe the same pattern is playing out right
now.

The mechanism is straightforward. Suppose a war destroys some
company’s oil supplies — but not yours. The global price of oil
rises because total supply has fallen, even though your company has
lost nothing. You now sell the same amount of oil as before at
dramatically higher prices, having done nothing to improve your
product or your efficiency. It is a pure windfall.

When this happened during the 2021 and 2022 shocks, companies like
ExxonMobil and Chevron posted record profits. There were,
understandably, calls to tax those profits and return something to the
public bearing the cost of higher prices at the pump.

As Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, remarked: “There has been
discussion in the US about our industry returning some of our profits
directly to the American people. In fact, that’s exactly what
we’re doing — in the form of our quarterly dividend.”

Needless to say, chances are, you are not the one receiving that
dividend.

Who Gets the Money?

To track where fossil fuel profits actually end up, the researchers
followed the ownership chain from oil companies all the way down to
individual shareholders — including people who own oil stocks
indirectly through hedge funds, investment funds, or other companies.
The finding is stark.

The top 1% of the wealth distribution captured more than half of all
fossil fuel profits during the 2021–22 supply shocks. The bottom
half of Americans received just 1%. This fundamentally changes how we
understand supply shock–driven inflation. If you only look at rising
consumer prices, this inflation hits everyone roughly equally —
about 6.5% in 2022 across income groups. But once you factor in the
profits flowing back to shareholders, a very different picture
emerges.

For the top 1%, effective inflation in 2022 was around 3% — because
their dividend and stock income offset much of the price increases.
For the bottom 50%, there was no such offset. They were forced to
absorb the full hit.

What’s Happening Now

Individual companies have already reported the results. Shell
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and BP [[link removed]] have announced
huge profit surges. US crack spreads — the standard measure of
refinery profit margins — show that much of the increase in fuel
costs reflects higher profit margins, not higher input costs. And
because the major oil companies are vertically integrated, they profit
at both ends: from the increased prices they sell their excess crude
at, and from the rise in their own refinery margins.

Markets, it seems, were ahead of the public. Fossil fuel stocks began
rising in January and February of this year, when tensions with Iran
first escalated and the US invasion of Venezuela raised fears (or, for
shareholders, perhaps hopes) of further supply disruption.

Supply shocks do not spontaneously generate inequality, but instead
amplify the inequality already existing. The war in Iran did not
choose its economic winners and losers; the ownership structure of the
global fossil fuel industry did that. When we describe what follows
simply as “inflation” or “market dynamics,” we are using
neutral language to describe something that is, at its core, a
transfer of resources from people who are suffering to people who are
not.

_BEN BALINT-KURTI is an economics and antitrust journalist based in
New York. He was previously a research fellow at the Reimagining the
Economy project at Harvard._

_JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a
web audience of over 3,000,000 a month._

_Subscribe to Jacobin_ [[link removed]]_ today, get
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* United States
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* Economy
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* Inequality
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* Fossil Fuel Corportations
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* oil companies
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* War on Iran
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* wealth inequality
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