Gas prices ...

This time I don’t have an excuse for not having blogged in the last week, at least not a good one. I was curious to see what would happen because of the amended Act 47 plan (which I have still not read). I wanted to read the plan (see previous). I had already said much of what I wanted to say about the election (and no, that didn’t stop me from getting drawn into conversations on other blogs about it).

I probably could have said something about the G20 summit (what was Obama thinking … was it really something to do with Rooney …etc). But I find it difficult to know what side to be on about this. I mean, we are a silly choice. But any city not San Francisco, LA, Chicago or New York is a silly choice. I mean, maybe Atlanta or Miami, but only because they are already sort of tourist/convention destinations. So if it had been Cincinnati or Des Moines, I would have been chuckling at their expense. So I didn’t say anything here (a bit elsewhere… I mean, c’mon, a city essentially bankrupt?).

But what I really want to talk about is gas prices. They have been at the back of my mind for some time (occasionally at the front). Time magazine did a story (which I first saw on Yahoo) about gas prices. They contend that oil producing countries are storing some of the oil they produce. I believe refineries have cut back on processing (something they do every year at this time – for routine yearly maintenance, just in time to sock it to Memorial Day drivers). And apparently the speculators are once again making bets about the economy six months from now, and it is affecting current prices. So even though demand is weak, and the storage containers are filling up, gas prices have been going up.

“There is some risk we will run out of storage space in the next four to six weeks …If we run out of storage it could prompt a collapse in the price” said Simon Wardell, director of an energy forecasting company (he said that in the time article).

Yeah, come on limited storage space. Collapse that price. This is kind of speculative crap that produced last summer's run up in gas prices. That battering of our economy probably contributed to the economic crash last fall. I mean, you can't draw a bright line, but I have decided to be suspicious anyway. And Jack Kelly wants to bash Obama's economic policy. Apparently drill here, drill now only works if the oil companies don't want to make money.

After all, understand that the speculators are betting the economy will be healthy enough in six months to have increased demand for oil. Who thinks that? In fact, who thinks that putting additional pressure on consumers now will assist the economy in recovering and having a boom in six months? Man, they are easy to turn into villains and idiots, all at the same time.