The prediction was explicitly conditional: only if the Middle East conflict escalated into a wider regional war that caused an oil shock would “rate cuts be kissed goodbye.”

1. Did the condition (wider regional war + oil shock) occur in 2024?

• Analyses in mid‑2024 noted that the Israel–Hamas war and associated tensions (including Red Sea attacks) had, up to that point, limited impact on the global economy, with the base case being that the conflict remained “largely confined.”

  • Bloomberg Intelligence/Bloomberg Economics described the ongoing conflict as having had limited global economic impact thus far, and treated a direct Israel–Iran war with a true oil supply disruption as a risk scenario, not the 2024 reality. (bloomberg.com)

• Their scenarios explicitly framed a genuine oil “shock” as prices surging toward $150/bbl in a major escalation; in contrast, they reported that markets were pricing in only a very small geopolitical risk premium (less than about $5 per barrel) under the actually observed, confined-war scenario. (bloomberg.com)

• Brent crude prices did not experience a sustained spike in 2024 driven by the Middle East conflict. Annual data show Brent averaging about $80.76/bbl in 2024, slightly below the 2023 level of $82.64, and quarterly data show prices in the mid‑80s in Q2 trending down into the high‑70s and low‑70s by late 2024. (ycharts.com)

Taken together, there was no large, sustained Middle‑East‑driven oil price shock in 2024 comparable to past “oil shock” episodes. The predicate of Sacks’s conditional (“if it develops into a wider regional war … if there’s an oil shock”) therefore did not materialize.

2. What happened to the Fed’s 2024 rate cuts?

• As of late 2023, markets were indeed pricing in large 2024 cuts – roughly six quarter‑point cuts (about 150 bps) was a widely cited Wall Street consensus, even more aggressive than the Fed’s own projection of three cuts. (fool.com)
• In reality, the Fed kept the federal funds rate at 5.25–5.50% through the first half of 2024, signaling growing caution as inflation progress stalled. (cbsnews.com)
• The first cut didn’t arrive until September 18, 2024, when the Fed reduced rates by 50 bps to a 4.75–5.00% range, and guidance plus market pricing pointed to at most a further 50 bps of easing by year‑end—far fewer and later than what markets had priced in at the end of 2023. (cnbc.com)
• However, Fed communications attribute the delay and smaller‑than‑expected cuts primarily to sticky inflation and still‑solid economic data, not to any oil‑price shock from the Middle East. (cnbc.com)

3. Evaluation of the prediction

• Sacks’s claim was: If there is a wider regional war that produces an oil shock, then the big 2024 rate cuts markets expected would be off the table.
• In 2024, the key trigger condition (a genuine oil shock from a wider regional war) did not occur. Without that, we cannot tell from actual history whether his causal statement about how the Fed would react under that specific scenario is correct or not.
• It is true that the large 2024 cuts markets expected in late 2023 did not materialize, but they were curtailed without the mechanism he specified (no large oil‑shock‑driven inflation surge).

Because the world never entered the scenario he was conditioning on, the prediction is neither confirmed nor falsified by what actually happened.

Conclusion: the correct grading is “ambiguous”: enough time has passed, but the conditional scenario did not occur, so the prediction’s accuracy cannot be determined from observed outcomes.