Grocery prices are going up, we may be dealing with another pandemic, Trump is threatening draconian tariffs and we’re on the verge of deporting the vast majority of the agriculture workforce. So the economy is getting more fragile by the day. One of Trump’s answer to all that is “drill, baby, drill.” Krugman takes a look at that in his newsletter today: Basically, any large decline in energy prices would lead to a fall in production, driving prices right back up. In today’s world, U.S. shale oil drillers are the marginal producers — the producers whose decisions set both a floor and a ceiling on overall oil prices. As I write this, the benchmark price of U.S. crude oil — the West Texas Intermediate price — is just over $70 a barrel. And here’s the thing: any substantial decline in prices from this point would make drilling new wells unprofitable in many U.S. oilfields: This doesn’t mean that production would stagnate; it would decline, as older fields get exhausted. So even if you believe, wrongly, that regulation is a major barrier to energy production, there’s no way Trump can engineer a major decline in prices. Meanwhile Trump is demanding a reduction in interest rates which won’t happen if inflation persists. At least if the system we now have is still functional. Krugman again: Right now the Fed is a quasi-independent institution run by technocrats, who set interest rates based on their assessment of what the economy needs rather than taking instructions from…