Got Gas? U.S. Economy to Worsen as Gas Prices Skyrocket

[ZaneNBK]

There were several stations in the city core over $5

The local news reports are in this thread earlier.

Here is a national news article where prices were higher than you think.

You obviously such at the Internets search and should not post.

Wow, just 9 days ago you stated the highest price you'd seen so far was $4.89 in response to my statement that we have not yet hit the $5 price you'd "predicted" years ago. Now that's jumped up to over $5 apparently. Must be hard remembering all the lies you spout, but let me remind you of this one:

When paying $4.89 for regular I would say that's close enough to $5

You may not but that is my opinion.

Looks like it will go past $5 shortly so suck it.

 

[Ninjahedge]

Who



cares.

 

[Londo_Jowo]

Gas below $3.00/gal at 3 stations now.

http://www.houstongasprices.com/Shell_Gas_Stations/Sugar_Land/113096/index.aspx

 

[SparkyJJO]

More Dave McOwned fail - even his linked article supports what I said even though he claims otherwise

And even better that he contradicts himself

Gas around here is mostly just under $3.20, though there are a couple stations a few miles away that are $3.13. Oh, and I cannot forget the retarded Marathon station sitting at $3.44 They always have higher prices than anyone else, usually a good 20-30 cents more too and I rarely see anyone at the pumps. How they stay in business I don't know.

 

[wirednuts]

id like to see gas back down to 2.25 or so a gallon. in my eyes, thats still over twice the price it used to cost not that many years ago

 

[Londo_Jowo]

Prices are continuing to drop close to where I live. Filled up this morning and paid $2.89/gal (including discount). I thought that gas was supposed to be going up ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.

 

[Engineer]

Prices are continuing to drop close to where I live. Filled up this morning and paid $2.89/gal (including discount). I thought that gas was supposed to be going up ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.

So did I. Fell $0.02 yesterday to $3.27 (before discounts). I'm very surprised that it's going down but again, usage is going down so maybe it's not a surprise. Again, I suspect that the possibility of Thanksgiving travel will drive the price up this week.

Regardless, it's still too high and a drag on the economy.

 

[mshan]

I saw commentary on tv from owner of NFL team Texans (apparently in oil business) and he said demand for oil was high because of demand for diesel, heating oil, and jet fuel.

Demand for gasoline in U. S. may be seasonally low for now, and am wondering if refiners overproduced gas because their input costs were temporarily low because of excess oil in Cushing (WTI futures apparently price here), but gas apparently being priced off of Brent (spread is closing now).

He said something about middle distillates, so need someone who knows about what you can yield from a barrel of oil to chime in.

Dennis Gartman also said you have to look at average price of WTI and Brent to get idea of direction of oil (average is apparently headind down).




edit: Google search ->

"When the barrel is processed, you may get something like 15 gallons of gasoline, 9 gal. of fuel oil (See Gasoil / D2), 10 gal. of jet fuel (Kerosene) and 4 gal of other "heavy" products such as lubricants, grease, asphalt / bitumene and plastics and 4 gallons of lighter condensates/naphtha."

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_gasoline_can_be_made_from_one_barrel_of_crude_oil

 

[Londo_Jowo]

Middle Distillates: A general classification of fuels that includes heating oil, jet fuel, diesel fuel, and kerosene.

 

[Engineer]

I did notice that diesel was at $4.10 per gallon on the way to work yesterday. Ouch for everything that you buy (most everything) that is delivered to market via diesel truck/train.

 

[Svnla]

$2.99/gal for regular here.

Dave, where are the $5 gas? Must be at the gas station inside your head, LOL.

 

[dmcowen674]

Wow, just 9 days ago you stated the highest price you'd seen so far was $4.89 in response to my statement that we have not yet hit the $5 price you'd "predicted" years ago. Now that's jumped up to over $5 apparently. Must be hard remembering all the lies you spout, but let me remind you of this one:

Being in the deep south of hick town Arkansas I could understand how you can't tell the difference between a big city such as Chicago Vs the suburbs since you've obviously never seen a big city.

 

[Engineer]

Gas FELL another $0.08 today down to $3.19. Completely shocked as to why this is happening now. Maybe the gas rates are finally re-aligning themselves after a year of outrunning oil prices.

 

[dmcowen674]

$2.99/gal for regular here.

Dave, where are the $5 gas? Must be at the gas station inside your head, LOL.

Southerner 4ever!!!

Same applies to you.

For some reason they don't charge the deep hick south anywhere as much as the north.

The south may have lost the civil war but certainly beating the north because the oil/gas thugs in Texas keep the south's prices lower than the north.

Someone at a high Federal level should be addressing this inequality but they are not for now.

Enjoy it while you can, I'm sure at some point the north will not stand for it anymore at some point and have to come down and kick southern ass once again.

 

[dmcowen674]

I did notice that diesel was at $4.10 per gallon on the way to work yesterday. Ouch for everything that you buy (most everything) that is delivered to market via diesel truck/train.

Did you read the article I posted?

There is a shortage of diesel in south America so the refineries in the U.S. are all sending the diesel down there while doubling diesel prices here.

This will put a nail in the coffin for independent truck drivers in the U.S. which I'm sure is the plan all along.

 

[Svnla]

Southerner 4ever!!!

Same applies to you.

For some reason they don't charge the deep hick south anywhere as much as the north.

The south may have lost the civil war but certainly beating the north because the oil/gas thugs in Texas keep the south's prices lower than the north.

Someone at a high Federal level should be addressing this inequality but they are not for now.

Enjoy it while you can, I'm sure at some point the north will not stand for it anymore at some point and have to come down and kick southern ass once again.

You are going to lead the peniless ragtag team down here? How are you going to pay for the $5 gas? Hold the sign "will work for gas"? Coocoo, coocoo... LOL

 

[Londo_Jowo]

Wow, just 9 days ago you stated the highest price you'd seen so far was $4.89 in response to my statement that we have not yet hit the $5 price you'd "predicted" years ago. Now that's jumped up to over $5 apparently. Must be hard remembering all the lies you spout, but let me remind you of this one:

Chicago Gas Prices tells the real story. I still love the fact McOwned pays close to a $1.00/gal more than most of us.

http://www.chicagogasprices.com/

 

[cybrsage]

Gas Prices the day BEFORE Obama took office: $1.85 per gallon.

http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2009/01/gas-prices-2.html

 

[mizzou]

Gas Prices the day BEFORE Obama took office: $1.85 per gallon.

http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2009/01/gas-prices-2.html

I am a bit bothered Obama totally ignores publicly the speculation problem that ran rampant his entire administration.

 

[cybrsage]

He has the most transparent administration ever...provided you redifine transparent to have the same meaning as opaque. I am just glad he followed his promised about the sunset plege...that way we got to read the obamacare law prior to it being passed.

I am gald the troops from Iraq all came home many months ago too, as well as GitMo being closed...just as he promised.

 

[mshan]

$1.85 / gallon (when 8 years of Bush had just crashed global financial markets into edge of depression) is a joke of a comparison. Weren't we talking about $4 plus gas probably that summer before or earlier when "subprime" had not really hit mainstream public's attention yet?

It's like using October 2007 economic and job stats (right before financial markets melted down and companies suddenly had no visibility and started dumping jobs and inventories because they could not see what was going to happen going forward) as "baseline" against which Obama's economic performance is compared:

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/79570934/ (look at huge spike in bubble induced "jobs" in graph around 1:30 mark and wonder how many of those "jobs" were really illusory from a baseline economic standpoint, building homes no one would need for years, etc)

 

[mshan]

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+high+were+gas+prices+august+2008

August 2008 Larry Kudlow was crowing about how suprime was only 15% of GDP and could only cause a mild recession, at worst.

Then, "economic Pearl Harbor" (as Warren Buffett called it) in October 2008:

"Four global banks are intermediaries in 85 percent of OTC derivatives transactions. The same banks dominate prime brokerage. The same banks own large equity interests in the now demutualised exchanges, clearinghouses and even warehouses of the global markets. Naturally, the same banks dominated underwriting of securitised assets. The implications have scarcely been grasped of what this portends in terms of the information asymmetries and the opportunity to manipulate markets without risk.

Each of these roles gives these few banks a view into the positions of market investors. They know who owns what, using what leverage, under what terms, and trading in which markets. Knowing that, the manipulation of prices to impoverish investors and enrich the ruling banks is child's play with a bit of ill-transparent HFT through proprietary dealing desks and connected hedge funds aligned with the firms.

These banks will protest that there are Chinese walls between their trading desks and the market infrastructure they own. The problem with Chinese walls is that they have chinks in them. (Apologies to PC crowd, but it is an old Wall Street joke I'm quoting.) We have seen from what is now reported about securitisations, that these banks structured products to trade against their clients, often colluding with hedge funds to share the profits. Is it likely that when they balance the public interest in market integrity against next year's bonus they become much more altruistic?

In October 2008 the global financial markets crashed. The story in the media is that it was a panic caused by the insolvency of Lehman Brothers. This is not the truth - or at least not all of it. The crash actually followed a $2 trillion margin call by these four global banks on their prime brokerage clients and OTC counterparties - effectively a 30 per cent increase in required margin. It was the margin call that forced liquidation of global portfolios of all asset classes - and particularly the high quality, most liquid asset classes."
http://londonbanker.blogspot.com/2011/05/concentration-manipulation-and-margin.html

"Having listened to all 42 minutes of the late night Treasury briefing of investment banks on Sunday, there is no doubt in my mind that this legislation represents the sort of federal largesse for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citibank and JPMorgan Chase that the Iraq war provided for Halliburton and Blackwater."

http://londonbanker.blogspot.com/2008/10/financial-eugenics-paulson-plan-for.html

And where was Bush (we are buying low and selling high, right), vacuum of leadership so bad that President elect Obama had to step in and reassure markets that there would be an adult in charge in near future.

 

[Londo_Jowo]

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+high+were+gas+prices+august+2008And where was Bush (we are buying low and selling high, right), vacuum of leadership so bad that President elect Obama had to step in and reassure markets that there would be an adult in charge in near future.

Yet things are far worse now we have an "adult in charge".

 

[mshan]

Bush buy low sell high, right?: http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...g+high&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari

But former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer wrote in an upcoming book (excerpted by GQ) that, even hours before he gave an address promoting the TARP, Bush fundamentally misunderstood what the program was all about:

Under his proposal, he said, the federal government would buy troubled mortgages on the cheap and then resell them at a higher price when the market for them stabilized. “We’re buying low and selling high,” he kept saying. The problem was that his proposal didn’t work like that…As it turned out, the plan wasn’t to buy low and sell high. In some cases, in fact, Secretary Paulson wanted to pay more than the securities were likely worth in order to put more money into the markets as soon as possible. [...]

In the theater, the president was clearly confused about how the government would buy these securities. He repeated his belief that the government was going to “buy low and sell high,” and he still didn’t understand why we hadn’t put that into the speech like he’d asked us to. When it was explained to him that his concept of the bailout proposal wasn’t correct, the president was momentarily speechless. He threw up his hands in frustration. “Why did I sign on to this proposal if I don’t understand what it does?” he asked.

The proposal that Bush offered that night would ultimately be rejected by the House of Representatives, with a slightly modified bill passing one week later. And it should come as no surprise that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson ultimately abandoned the idea to buy toxic assets entirely, instead opting for bank recapitalization, devoid of meaningful strings for the banks. As Latimer reported it, “the treasury secretary didn’t seem to know [which course of action he favored], changed his mind, had misled the president, or some combination of the three.”

Paulson Plan for Financial Eugenics

And then there is a huge arbitrage opportunity as well so that everyone makes money for years to come. According to the conference call, the pricing on offer from the Treasury will be a bit below Level 3 pricing. The toxic assets will be repackaged and resold with a new AAA wrapper, possibly priced well below what the Treasury paid, assuring a huge profit on both immediate liquidation by the banks and ultimate maturity by investors. The Fed gets its cash and Treasuries back; the banks make huge profits; the foreigners and off-shore tax avoiders get disguised ownership of the American financial system; the taxpayer gets ripped off. What’s not to love?

http://londonbanker.blogspot.com/2008/10/financial-eugenics-paulson-plan-for.html

 

[Londo_Jowo]

Yet no matter how badly you want to blame Bush for the continuing problems, the supposed "Adult In Charge" has made things worse. Throw money at the problem, eventually it will fix itself.