What expensive sulfur means for your dinner table

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If you're wealthy, it might be a little easier to take candy meant for a child. This is one takeaway from a 2012 paper titled "Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior" that just won the Ig Nobel Prize for economics. This is … a satirical prize. It highlights work that will 1) make you laugh and then 2) make you think. Among the paper's examples, wealthier individuals were found to cut off other vehicles more often, cheat more often in a dice game for money, AND take more candy from a jar explicitly labeled for children. If you're wealthy, I guess the rules of society suddenly don't apply.

Coming up, what expensive sulfur means for your dinner table, how low oil supply is becoming harder to ignore, and how Lego measures up to Hollywood.

1) The oil crisis isn't going away What To Know: The Gulf continues to send much less oil to the world than before the Iran war. Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline that bypassed the Strait of Hormuz got shut down last week after drone attacks coming from Iraq. If it doesn't come online within a month, it could have a seismic impact, keeping more than 100 million barrels of oil from international markets. Already, crude oil prices in the U.S. have shot up in the past few weeks. For more than a year, stockpiles of oil have made this seem like less of a crisis than it is, couching gas prices, but they're running out. Now, The Wall Street Journal reports the "Great Fuel Crisis" that execs have warned about for months is finally here.

What does this change?: Even if the Strait of Hormuz fully reopened tomorrow, oil prices aren't just going to pop down to normal right away. Heightened prices are likely to stick around for a while as the market resets. Making things worse, backups available to cushion oil prices have been working on overdrive, and now many are at their limits. For example, the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve could be used as a source to transition us back to a higher oil supply if the global taps are turned back on. But it's at its lowest level since 1982 and will take months, if not years, to refill. Then there's refining capacity. Helima Croft with RBC Capital, an investment bank, told CNBC U.S. refiners are operating at 98% capacity. In other words, even if more oil becomes available to be refined, there's no spare capacity to handle it.

2) Expensive sulfur may be another thorn in the side of your dinner table bill - AgWeb

What To Know: Sulfur is needed in fertilizer, which, of course, is needed to grow your food. But the price of it has gone haywire. In 2024, it was $46 per ton. In 2025, $180 per ton. Spot prices in July saw a ton of sulfur go for more than $1,000 per metric ton. A spokesman for Mosaic Company, which produces phosphate fertilizer, told AgWeb the prices are SO high that phosphate fertilizer use is expected to drop significantly. Mosaic confirmed with The Indicator that they have already idled two facilities in Louisiana, impacting 300 families. There's no single number connecting high sulfur prices to food inflation, but Oxford Economics, pointing to higher diesel and fertilizer prices, sees global food prices going up another 4.8% in 2027.

But the U.S. produces its OWN sulfur!!: Unfortunately, the U.S. is not immune to the global supply disruption. Several countries in the Middle East, including Iran, are big suppliers of sulfur, but it's stuck behind the closed Strait of Hormuz. Russia is also a major producer, but its exports are banned to many countries. Now, other countries in need of sulfur are coming to U.S. markets. All this is causing prices to increase, including for Mosaic. So when food prices get higher in 2027, you can tell your friends about this weird mechanic.