AAA projects 45.1 million Americans will travel at least fifty miles from home for Memorial Day between Thursday and Monday, a new holiday record and a slight increase over the 44.8 million who traveled last year. [1]

The forecast is mostly a road story. AAA expects 39.1 million people to drive, accounting for 87 percent of holiday travelers, plus 3.66 million who will fly and 2.2 million who will travel by bus, train, or cruise. [1] That is the household side of an economy now indexed to the Strait of Hormuz.

AAA writes the connection in one careful sentence: drivers are paying more at the pump than last Memorial Day, when the national average for a gallon of regular sat at $3.17, and current pump prices are the highest they have been since the summer of 2022. [1] The agency does not name Iran. The bond market is less coy: the thirty-year Treasury yield touched 5.19 percent this week, a near-nineteen-year high, while the 10-year ran to 4.667 percent on what CNBC framed as renewed inflation fears tied to energy supply. [2]

That is the passthrough the paper has been tracking. Hormuz freight, insurance, and fertiliser costs reach households through the gas pump and the term premium, then meet a holiday weekend in which Americans drive anyway. Travel demand says the consumer is intact. The thirty-year says the funding side has noticed.

A record forecast does not falsify the war's macro bill; it shows where the bill arrives. Forty-five million getaways and a 5.19 percent long bond are the same week's evidence that holiday spending and Hormuz inflation are now living in the same calendar.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco