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U.S. Gas Prices Continue To Fall
First time accepted submitter nmpost writes "Earlier this year, as gas prices hit record highs in the winter and spring for that time of year, experts warned we were headed for all time records this summer. Something strange happened before every motorists recurring nightmare happened: gas prices actually started dropping. In fact, prices have fallen over $.50 since they peaked in the spring. Experts have now flipped their projections, and believe prices will continue to tumble through the fall."
I guess that's one way to look at someone raising the prices extremely high then dropping them down a bit. The gentlemen who manage the prices are very good at planning ahead. Now Obama can use this information to swing votes.
I wish everyone had a better memory.
Demand is low because we're in a world wide recession. They'll go back up when the economy recovers, but that could be a while because we're still coming down off the 90's bubble which knocked everything out of line.
Experts have no clue what will happen and guess like everybody.
Yeah, gas prices peak in the late spring around Memorial Day. Refineries have less capacity in May as they transition from making home heating oil in the winter to summer gasoline blends. Last winter was one of the mildest on record, so less home heating oil was needed. Also, cheap natural gas and popular migration to warmer areas of the country are leading to less use of home heating oil in the northeast. So refineries were able to stop making home heating oil earlier than normal this year. The gas price spike happened earlier in the year than normal, at a time that coincided with Iranian sabre-rattling about closing down the Persian Gulf. Now, as TFA mentions, weak economic growth worldwide is holding down demand, and prices are dropping.
Why does anyone listen to stupid news reports predicting future gas prices anyway? You only get on the news by predicting extreme change or extreme hardship. When you say it will be about the same as always, there's (magically) no air time available for that report. This goes for all predictions that masquerade as news. Predictions are not news, and no one know the future. Stop listening to them.
Incumbent qualifies for another term... Need i say more?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Demand destruction benefits the US enormously. We now export gasoline and now care about fuel economy.
Use less fuel, keep more of your money.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Interesting that Rolling stone magazine wrote this article a while back. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405
Note the whole thing about oil prices having been spiked as a bubble, and in the process of being respiked. Also note the whole thing on carbon tax credits etc. If true, I wonder how much longer the world at large will put up with such shenanigans?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Will those people who put signs up at gas pumps blaming Obama for rising gas prices put up signs giving him credit for the drop in prices?
Because the US President clearly has a whole hell of a lot of control over the price of a global commodity.
No matter who wins, the day after election day it will go right back up again and then some.
Demand is low because we're in a world wide recession. They'll go back up when the economy recovers, but that could be a while because we're still coming down off the 90's bubble which knocked everything out of line.
But you will have more bubble bursts and more crises. The system is just instable since neoliberal policitians removed all the safeguards that were set up after the 1929 crisis: the, Glass-Steagall Act, an higher income tax for the wealthie...
What on earth makes you think that any American financial firm has the clout to get OPEC, Russia and the other petroleum exporting countries to change prices at whim?
They cannot of course. The price drops have much more to do with demand destruction - less money, less gas. No speculator conspiracy, no Wall Street conspiracy, no oil company conspiracy.
Turns out the petroleum price is pretty elastic, at least in the short term.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Experts who claim that prices will continue to rise when prices have been rising, or continue to fall when prices have been falling, are nothing but weather vanes. These are the same idiots who have denied that we were in the last half dozen bubbles; the same idiots who were excited about DOW 30,000; the same idiots who claimed that stock/housing prices could just keep going up and up FOREVER!
just a ghost in the machine.
Yes, that's one consequence of letting the economy crash by removing all the safety barriers, then refusing to pay attention to all the warnings because he was on vacation all of the time.
I can see a trend - the extremists in the Republican party want someone far crazier than Reagan at his worst and lazier than Bush when he was asleep. I'm sure they'll do a "heck of a job".
Does that count the couple battery replacements the Prius will likely need during that lifetime?
The real question is how much longer the world will put up with the economic shenanigans that our financial god-kings have been pulling for at least the past thirty years, with bankers getting parachute drops of free money which they then set on fire, while the people are being told to "tighten their belts".
You are welcome on my lawn.
This happens every election year. It happened in 2008 as well.
The carbon credits you refer to, otherwise known as cap-and-trade, is pretty simple and great system that combines the best of free markets and government regulation. There is a consensus that we need to lower emissions and most people agree that some form of regulation from the government is needed. The problem is that it's very difficult to create a set of rules that work as intended.
For example UK recently built a massive power plant that runs on biofuel and what actually happens is that they transport the fuel all the way from Canada to be burned in UK. Why? Environmentally it would be better to burn it in Canada but UK provides greater incentives for such power plants. We could try to fix every small issue like that - both internationally and inside countries - but we'll always be left with incomplete (and increasingly complex) set of regulations that encourage to do stupid things. We need a free markets based solution that discourages polluting, not regulations that encourage finding workarounds.
Cap-and-trade is exactly that system. Rights to pollute are auctioned and the acceptable amount of pollution is slowly reduced over time, which encourages solutions that efficiently reduce pollution but discourages expensive solutions that provide relatively little benefits. The economic incentive for any environmental decision is directly relative to how much it actually helps the environment.
Now... that all said, there are some flaws. First of all, for the system to work perfectly, (nearly) all countries should participate and all pollution (be it traffic, energy, industrial...) should be distributed like that. Certain aspects need tweaking (For example, a ton of greenhouse gases released to the upper atmosphere by airplanes are about as harmful as two tons of such gases released at ground level...) and others are difficult to handle just through cap-and-trade (relatively small amount of pollution to a very important wildlife sanctuary, for example) and one can argue that the way that the pollution rights are currently distributed is unfair towards developing countries... even so, the concept is great and with a little more effort put into cap-and-trade, it could allow us to abolish huge amounts of inefficient regulation and incentivize us to reduce pollution as efficiently as possible.
Why was this labeled flamebait? Did everyone forget the S&L scandal of the 80s, with everyone getting golden parachutes while the taxpayers got the bills, Worldcom and Enron of the 90s, companies getting tax breaks to send jobs overseas in the 00s?
Whether you like it or not you could put the holders of 85% of this country's wealth in your average HS gym and have seats left over, and whenever you have wealth concentrated THAT much its gonna become what we have now, bribery and backscratching and screwing the peasants to concentrate ever MORE wealth, simply because there is no such thing as too much wealth and power for those at the top.
I have to wonder if this is why no democracy has lasted as long as we have, or no empire survived more than a few hundred years. Money simply gets too concentrated, the peasants get tired of living like animals, and eventually the whole thing just falls down. I know it would be damned hard to argue that the average American is better off now than they were 30 years ago, with nearly half paying no taxes because they are too poor and the welfare and disability roles exploding.
Oil manipulation is just one of many abuses of the system we have seen,and in everything from the housing bubble to the dotbombs we've seen those at the top never seem to lose. that's no accident, that is having enough power to game the system, to make sure you are declared "too big to fail" and getting paid even if you lose.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"...aesthetic life...".
Good lord. Some times I wonder if humanity deserves to live. Should a species that has a concept such as a car 'nearing the end of its aesthetic life' survive?