"Short Wave Sportfishing" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 09 May 2007 22:39:21 -0400, Wayne.B
wrote:

On Wed, 9 May 2007 17:28:11 -0400, "John" wrote:

"There's no correlation any longer between crude oil prices and gasoline
prices," he insists. "Crude could drop to $10/barrel, and you could still
have gasoline go to $4/gallon. All the crude oil price does is set a
floor
on gasoline prices."

Nonsense.

Never argue with somebody who doesn't understand the oil/gas spread.

I once entered into an discussion with somebody who wanted to boycott
Exxon Mobile because of excess profits. I tried to explain that a
boycott of Exxon Mobile wouldn't do anything because of the way gas
pricing is structured and how all the major retailers sell gas to each
other all the time.

Also couldn't get him to understand this one simple fact - that demand
decrease (boycott) for one leads to an increase in price for the
others becasue while demand goes down for one retailer, demand goes up
for others supplying the same product.

Just didn't get it.

Simple economics is beyond the ken of most folks.

True enough. Supply and demand, but there is no major interruption in oil
right now, the reason given for high gas price is a bottleneck at the
refineries. Well two facts stick out. 1.) The oil companies all decided
to do maintenance on their refineries at the same time - causing a shortage.
2.) refineries are the biggest cash cow, and have accounted for the largest
increase in oil companies profits this past year.
So are prices being manipulated???

Like Fox says - we report you decide