September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
I am a Pole. My country borders Europe’s largest war since 1945, heats itself with coal and imported gas, and arms itself on borrowed money. From here the news does not arrive as separate stories.
Every generation believes it is living through the end of something. What is different in 2026 is that the crises have stopped arriving one at a time. A war in the Gulf becomes the price of my diesel, smaller harvests from Sudan to Yemen and a half-empty gas cavern in Bavaria.
The world is not ending. But for thirty years we swapped buffers for dependencies, because a supplier is cheaper than a stockpile and a guarantee is cheaper than an army. When a dependency failed, we did not rebuild the buffer. We found another dependency. Every swap worked for as long as the thing at the other end was there. This year, several of those things were tested together.
Start about 4,000 kilometres south-east of Warsaw. US and Israeli military operations against Iran began in late February. Since March, Iran has kept the Strait of Hormuz closed with drones, missiles, mines and small boats.
Tanker traffic through it has fallen by more than 90 percent. The International Energy Agency calls it the largest supply disruption the oil market has ever seen. What follows is that closure travelling in three directions at once: into fuel, into food and into this winter’s heating.
Markers on the chart open when you hover over or tap them.
A fragile ceasefire pulled prices back to pre-war levels in early summer, then broke down. By early September Brent crude was near $97 a barrel, up 19 percent in a month, by mid-month it was around $105, and on 24 September it touched $108.
On 22 September Iran handed Washington a written road map: a regional ceasefire of up to 60 days, a phased reopening of the strait and an end to the American naval blockade. Washington rejected it, and by one report the president expects to resume bombing after the November midterm elections.
The detour around the Gulf runs through the Red Sea’s own chokepoint, the Bab al-Mandab, where Houthi forces seized a key Yemeni port this month.
A chart doing the rounds on investing forums this month shows a tanker-shipping fund going parabolic. It is real. The Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF, which tracks the cost of hiring a crude tanker, rose more than 600 percent in the first two months of the war and was up more than 2,300 percent for the year by early September. Day rates for some supertankers went from under $100,000 before the war to a record of about $860,000 on 10 September.
The fund is tiny, and its own manager says rates will fall if the strait reopens. But the same closure that empties a granary fills somebody’s brokerage account.
Ukrainian drones have hit Russian refineries at least 70 times this year, roughly once every four days by the IEA’s count, pushing Russia’s refining output to a two-decade low. Half of its six biggest diesel plants cut or halted output this month, and Moscow has restricted fuel exports.
US diesel passed $6 a gallon for the first time on 10 September. The American president has phoned Kyiv to ask it to stop hitting diesel targets.
A viral post in mid-September declared that France was running out of fuel. The official data is less dramatic and more instructive. On 20 September, 15 percent of stations had run out of petrol or diesel, up from 11 percent two days earlier. In Grand Est it was 20 percent.
The government rules out a shortage. About nine in ten of the dry stations belong to TotalEnergies, which caps petrol at €1.99 a litre, and drivers fleeing record prices elsewhere emptied its tanks faster than trucks could refill them. The official count also understates the gaps: a station is listed only when it is out of every petrol grade or out of diesel.
A price cap meant as a cushion, in a system with no slack, turned a price shock into empty pumps.
The strait normally carries up to 30 percent of internationally traded fertiliser. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warns that scarcity will cut yields and tighten food supplies through late 2026 and into 2027.
The damage is delayed. Fertiliser that arrives late cannot recover lost yield, and because people keep eating grain planted before the disruption, the system looks fine until the smaller harvests come in.
2025 was the first year in the history of the Global Report on Food Crises with two confirmed famines, in Gaza and Sudan. Funding for food assistance fell an estimated 59 percent between 2022 and 2025.
The World Food Programme estimates that sustained high oil prices could push up to 45 million more people into acute food insecurity.
Europe’s potato belt tells the story in a single season. Last year there was a glut across the continent; in Poland alone growers lifted about 7 million tonnes, 18 percent more than the year before, and by spring farmers were selling below cost. So growers in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Germany planted 14 percent less. Then came five heatwaves and a drought. Their growers’ organisation now expects a harvest down 25 percent, one of the smallest in a decade, and in Belgium the price of potatoes for processing went from €10 to €150 a tonne within days.
Grain is dearer too. Milling wheat on the Paris exchange has gone from €191 a tonne in January to about €245, a rise of 28 percent, and maize is up 36 percent. At Polish purchase points wheat has gone from 778 zloty a tonne to about 900, and maize from 748 to over 930. Back in May, traders were already pointing to frost and drought here, drought in France and America, and record energy prices.
By Credit Agricole Bank Polska’s count, on FAO data, we are the most food self-sufficient country in the EU, covering our own needs in seven of nine food groups, everything except fish and vegetable fats. In a normal year we grow about a fifth more grain than we use, and we are among the world’s ten largest food exporters. If any country should be insulated from a food shock, it is this one.
It is not, because self-sufficiency is counted in tonnes and prices are set elsewhere. Polish grain buyers follow the Paris exchange with a lag of three to seven days. When the world pays more, our grain can simply leave, so the price at home has to match. And the harvest itself is made of things we do not control: diesel at a record, fertiliser that has to sail through Hormuz, and water that the Vistula no longer carries. Poland can feed itself. It cannot price itself.
After 2022 we Europeans replaced Russian pipeline gas with liquefied natural gas (LNG) bought on a global market, and Qatar, shipping close to a fifth of the world’s LNG through Hormuz, was one of that market’s pillars. QatarEnergy declared force majeure in March. Drone damage at Ras Laffan has taken about 17 percent of capacity offline, with repairs estimated at three to five years.
In August roughly one Qatari cargo made it through the strait, against a pre-war flow of some 6.5 million tonnes a month, dozens of cargoes.
The summer heat that drove up cooling demand also forced nuclear plants to curtail output, and wind generation was weak. The new dependency ran through a chokepoint about 39 kilometres wide at its narrowest.
After 2022 we stopped buying Russian crude, and Saudi Aramco became the main supplier to Orlen, Poland’s state-controlled oil refiner, at about 40 percent. That oil reached us without passing Hormuz, through a 1,200-kilometre pipeline across the Arabian desert to the Red Sea. On 10 September drones shut that pipeline. Aramco cancelled late-September cargoes and has reportedly told its European buyers to expect none in October. The pipeline restarted on 22 September at a trickle, with no date for full flow.
Orlen is buying on the spot market from Norway, Britain, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and the Americas, and a new deal with Equinor covers up to a quarter of its refining capacity. Orlen says its refineries are being supplied without disruption. But an energy journalist, Jakub Wiech, writes that a pump price starting with a nine, 9 zloty a litre, is no longer out of reach.
Orlen set up a Swiss trading arm in 2022 to find oil that was not Russian, and gave it $600 million to work with. In November 2023, during a brief easing of US sanctions, that unit agreed to buy six million barrels of cheap Venezuelan crude. Within days it wired a $230 million advance to a Dubai intermediary, with no collateral and no bank guarantee. According to a Financial Times investigation, most of the money was turned into Tether, a crypto token pegged to the dollar, and handed over on USB sticks to brokers in Caracas hotels and restaurants.
One cargo worth about $29 million arrived. Chartered tankers waited off Venezuela for months, at a cost of some $72 million. The state now puts the total loss at about 1.6 billion zloty, or $424 million. In August, Warsaw prosecutors charged three former managers, who deny wrongdoing and face up to 25 years in prison.
It is worth remembering now, with the company shopping in a hurry again. A country that loses its regular supplier does not only pay more. It ends up dealing with people it does not know.
Then there is heat. Stockpiles at our mines are down roughly 43 percent in a year, and the country’s biggest miner expects its own heaps to shrink to practically nothing by December.
In mid-September the head of Orlen Termika told an industry conference that a frosty winter would mean running out of coal, with everyone “scraping along the bottom.” He was dismissed the next day, though the company did not give that as the official reason.
Since September 2019 Kraków has banned coal and wood in boilers, stoves and even fireplaces. Residents are left with gas, heating oil, electricity or district heat.
The ban was a serious answer to a serious problem, in a city notorious for its winter smog. But it shows the same pattern as everything else here: a sound policy that removed a redundancy on the assumption that the replacement fuel would always be there.
A strong El Niño points to a milder winter. How hard this winter is now depends on the weather.
Now go about 8,600 kilometres east of Warsaw. For years the Bank of Japan held interest rates at zero, so Japan’s savings went abroad. Pension funds and insurers poured trillions into foreign bonds, and Japan became the largest foreign owner of US government debt, with about $1.2 trillion of Treasuries. It was the world’s most reliable lender, and it helped keep borrowing cheap for everyone, America above all.
That era is ending. On 18 September the Bank of Japan raised its policy rate to 1.25 percent, the highest since 1995, and a former board member expects a rise roughly every three months, towards 2 percent by the middle of 2027. Japan’s 10-year yield crossed 3 percent and reached 3.1 percent on 25 September, the highest since August 1996, pulled up by oil in the inflation numbers, by the Bank’s own hikes and by American yields. Japanese investors sold $29.6 billion of US debt in the first quarter alone.
Strategists do not describe a stampede home. They describe Japan quietly ceasing to be the buyer everyone could count on, and long-term borrowing costs rising everywhere as a result.
The US 10-year yield reached 5.2 percent on 25 September, the highest in nineteen years, since the summer before the 2007 crash. On 16 September the Fed raised rates for the first time since 2023, and markets price another rise. The drivers are the ones this essay is about: oil showing up in inflation expectations, a deficit that keeps growing, and weak demand at a Treasury auction, which is what happens when the patient buyer stays home. A 30-year mortgage now costs 7.12 percent, up from 6.09 in February.
Buyers are pausing and builder confidence is at a 12-month low. This is how a bond sell-off reaches a household: through the monthly payment.
My instinct says that whatever happens to American mortgages arrives here a little later. The research half agrees. House prices across rich countries move together, more so with each decade, and the IMF’s explanation is financial conditions that mirror America’s. After the American bust of 2006 it took about two years to reach us. In 2021 our central bank raised rates five months before the Fed, and both markets froze in the same year.
This time I do not need the research, because I have spent the past year looking for a house. The headline says Polish banks lent a record 14.8 billion zloty for housing in July. Look underneath it. The average loan is at a record because prices are, and more than a fifth of new lending is people refinancing old loans. Meanwhile developers in the seven biggest cities sit on a record 70,000 unsold flats, nearly 30 percent of them stale stock. Sales fell by about a tenth in the second quarter, though they were still above a year earlier, new supply is shrinking, selling takes longer and prices have stopped rising without