You are an idiot. Go learn economics......Even @HomeoftheJets who 99.9% of the time disagrees with me, agrees its not price gouging. You are just emotional and want someone to blame.
He was referring to inflation because of how much money the Fed has been printing. Almost 80% of all dollars in existence have been printed since 2020. Government spending is all fine and dandy until the cost of living goes up so much that it doesn't matter how many "helpful" government programs there are. It's not just gas, the price of everything is rising due to this. Have you seen used car prices? Food?
But that stimulus check didn't green light Oil companies to increase their prices. Did the Non-Russian supply of crude world wide suddenly plummet because of the Ukrainian invasion?
The prices of Gas has been going up for the past year, long before this war. You can't blame the war when the prices were already going up prior. Its called supply and demand. If you want the price of gas to go down, supply needs to be increased. Handing people money out of thin air, increased demand as well, artificial demand.
I go to supermarkets just like everybody else. You're saying inflation is driving up oil prices and not supply correct?
But.. supply hasn't decreased for the US has it? Do we still import the same amount of oil or not? If supply is steady, and demand is steady, why such STEEP price increases weekly?
Inflation is driving the price of everything up. Oil has been among the most affected things because it also has the Russia debacle contributing to it - that's why wheat is also up so much since Russia and Ukraine produce a ton of wheat. The supply of dollars is what's really been increasing, which devalues how much each one of those dollars buys you in goods. Inflation is absolutely responsible for most of the increase in the prices of all of these things though if that's what you're asking. Russia has just accelerated a trend that was already well in motion. This is why everyone calls Elizabeth Warren a moron whenever she tries to use these price increases as part of an anti-corporation tirade. Businesses are just doing business. They've been forced into this situation by inflation which the government is responsible for.
Its a lot of factors, also prices are based on contracts called futures. Its when you agree to exchange oil at a set price on a set date. The stimulus also created artificial demand without increasing supply of goods (actually we saw a decrease of supply because of work being shut down). Prices are surging on all commodities right now. Wheat, Soy beans, corn, etc. etc. Its not just oil, its everything. The chickens are coming home to roost.
Increasing the money supply has contributed to prices going up, as well as decreasing the supply of goods through shut downs. The government should have been contracting the money supply, not increasing it. Did it help in 2020? yes, but now we get to pay for it. In retrospect it might have been better to just crash the whole system two years ago. At least that might have forced the government to find a better solution to handling covid then just locking everything down. (Not trying to turn this into a covid debate), all im saying is if there was real pain at the time, the lax response wouldn't have sat as well as it did. A lot of people liked it because they got paid more to not work, then work. Economically, that makes zero sense and to think that we wouldn't eventually have to pay for it is foolish. We are just at the beginning of the pain though, this is going to turn into a complete financial crisis. The government should be focusing on ways to increase supply on all commodities right now. Definitely not pay people to sit home and do nothing.
You're saying then this is speculation on what the market price of oil and most other items will be. The free market then will be the determining factor, not supply or demand. IF that's true, Oil producers can and will charge whatever they want per barrel and the consumer will have no choice but to pay it. OPEC taught this lesson decades ago as they controlled the market.
That's a very small part of it. By far the biggest factor is that actual inflation is going through the roof. They're only speculating on higher prices because they understand economics and see the writing on the wall with inflation. The recent CPI print (a measure of inflation) was the highest one since 1982. Look at it this way - the supply of dollars has skyrocketed the last couple years due to government spending. What happens to the value of anything when supply skyrockets? It plummets, hence everything is more expensive in dollar terms. You're choosing to blame oil companies when they are a tiny fraction of why we have sky high oil prices.
The #1 blame should be the government for expending the money supply. Also paying people to stay home not to work for SO LONG was not logical. Maybe at the start, or what not......fine, but people were still getting checks recently. Artificial demand created through money printing + decrease in supply of commodities = disaster The disaster is just starting.
We don’t get a lot of oil from Russia but other countries do, if they stop they have to get it somewhere else, that’s ours more demand in the countries we get it from, price goes up.
We need fuaci to lock us down again. 2 week flatten the curve might calm this done a little. no one wants to work anyway.
It's 6 bux and up here in Los Angeles.... of course all the stations near me are at 7 bux and more for premium. I'm modifying my cars to run on Faygo Grape soda...
