Just a simple question..or two.

To you Oil Barrons out there..

You raise the price of oil with the threat of conflict worldwise.
You raise the price of oil with the threat of any storm that nears your rigs or oilfields.
You raise the price of oil with every threat of financial difficulty..

My question is..
Why didn't you lower it again when these events DIDN'T take place?

or even..

Just how much money do you have to make before you decide it's enough for you?

You make me sick..

I don't think that them deciding they've had enough money will be the case if and or when the price of oil is lowered. I think if/when the price of oil is lowered, it'll be because they found new supply of it, therefore they have more oil. I don't think oil barrons ever have "enough" money. There's never enough money for people who live their life with one outlook on life, take the most of what you can get.

When those events didn't take place, i think they used that as another reason to keep it up lol. And since i think Bush is one of these oil barrons, they can "legally" get away with it. Quite disappointing times they are creating for the average american and, well, actually the world.

Originally posted by AGENT_T


Just how much money do you have to make before you decide it's enough for you?

You make me sick..

How much money? you are asking how much money?
We do all the world oil exploitations, we do all the world new imperialisms just to feed your mouth!
Where do you think the American get all the money to enjoy the paradise, in order to give you paradise we have to build the world most sophisticated warfare. We give social benefit, health benefit, unemployment benefit.
Where did we get all this money? We rob the world to feed your mouth, and now you are complaining about oil price? You don't respect us as your rulers? You don't respect us the Jews?

Originally posted by Lonte You don't respect us as your rulers? You don't respect us the Jews?

Why do I get the distinct impression you are neither rich,an oil barron or Jewish?

Nice try mate.. Save the racial hate incitement for someone else..

The oil barrens dont give a flying frak about the average people in this world, and there to busy sitting in there million £ mansions or bleeding the world dry to answer your questions, as much as I'd like them to.
Its disgusting how they can get away with this, its not suprising though because the whole world revolves around oil, they have the monopoly and there gonna get every pound/dollar/euro they can out of us!

Sorry that started to turn into a rant lol, the whole oil fiasco boils my **** though.

Good questions though, I think the oil barrens should be made to answer them.

One question I'd ask myself and everyone else is...why are we letting them do this? I can't even answer that question myself!

Originally posted by fred3110
Sorry that started to turn into a rant lol, the whole oil fiasco boils my **** though.

Good questions though, I think the oil barrens should be made to answer them.

One question I'd ask myself and everyone else is...why are we letting them do this? I can't even answer that question myself!

I thought I did put this in rant at first .. Slip up on too many open tabs..

I posted this when I passed the same garage three times in one weekend and they'd put prices up 10p a gallon each time I passed it.. Unbelievable.. It's going up three times a week now....

Also do they think pricing it in litres is fooling anyone??

I remember the fuel protests back when it went up to £1 a gallon.. just a kid but I still remember when people USED to make their voices heard...
Now they just bend over and take it.

I can claim against work-related costs back as I'm self-employed but this is strangling EVERYTHING else too..

Well, I'm not rich (compared to most), and I'm not exactly an oil baron, but I have the answers to your questions anyway. They're really easy to see if you watch and listen objectively to what's going on.

The price of fuel is based on two things: the price of the raw materials (oil), and the price of overhead (taxes, buildings, exploration, etc.). This is true of any business, whether it's the corner grocery store, WalMart, or BP. What's also true is that Big Oil exists to make money. Somewhere, sometime, someone spent a lot of their hard-earned money to set up a refinery and hire people to run it, then more money to buy oil to make into gasoline. They did that so they could make a return on their investment. They did not do that because they wanted to help out AGENT_T (or TheRedneck, for that matter).

The price of oil, in turn, relies on several factors, each one a different company also interested in that time-honored evil venture of making money. Someone pumps the oil out of the ground, meaning they must pay for the mineral rights on the land, the cost of drilling the well, the cost of installing a pump, and the energy required to run that pump. Then someone has to deliver that oil to a refinery, paying for a tanker to move it in, and the fuel to power that tanker.

But before this ever happens, there's someone else with their hands in the cookie jar: speculators. Oil is a commodity. Anyone can buy it. If you have $128 laying around (and know a broker that deals in small quantities ), you can become the proud owner of a barrel of light sweet crude oil. As owner of that crude oil, if someone offers you $150 for it, you have the right to sell it and make $22 for your trouble. That's what speculators do, in larger quantities of course, but they do it through the use of futures.

Let's say that you have a gut instinct that oil will be $150.00 a barrel in two months. You can go to the oil well owner and say "Hey! I'd like to buy some oil from you, in two months. Here's my $128 per barrel and I'll be back in two months to get my oil." The well owner agrees, and you sign a contract. That contract is called a 'future' because it is based on what the future holds. If, in two months, oil is going for $150 per barrel, you just made $22 a barrel on whatever you purchased, and you don't even have to do anything! You just call up the refinery (Big Oil) and say "Hey, I want to sell some oil at the going rate. You interested?" Of course they are; the refinery doesn't do much without oil. They'll even send a tanker they know to pick it up from the well.

Now the more speculators think the price is going up, the more they offer for oil, which makes more speculators get interested, which takes the price up another notch, which... you get the idea. Everything runs this way until the speculators get scared and stop buying futures.

Now the gasoline is shipped (again, by truck, another cost) to the gas station. They sell it to you. The gas station was started much like the oil company, in order to make money. So they sell it to you for the same price as the other stations around. Why? Simple: if they price it lower, they are giving away profit they could have made, and if they sell it too high, everyone will go somewhere else. That's why prices seem to go up and down together.

Big Oil reports a profit of about 8% on their operation. That is extremely low. Retailers commonly make between 50% and 300% markup on the products they sell (of course, they pay overhead out of that, so the actual figure is a little lower). The number is so high (in billions and billions, to quote Carl Sagan) because they sell billions and billions of gallons of fuel! The gas station is barely making anything usually on the gas; they stay in business because you just paid $1.29 for a bottle of water while you were getting gas. The oil producers do make some good cash, and that's the other big problem.

The US dollar is dropping in value. That means that something in Europe costs more dollars than it did before, and something in America costs less Euros than it did. Since the USA doesn't allow drilling for oil here, we have to buy it from somewhere else. When we do that with a falling dollar, it costs more in dollars to get the same barrel of oil. The wells don't really make any more in real income, just in more pieces of paper called dollars.

We also have no new refineries, so a lot of our fuel has to be produced overseas. That's more services we pay for with a falling dollar. Then, since fuel standards are so high here, the ooil companies have to ship a lot of the fuel back overseas to sell it, because they simply can't sell it here for enough to pay for the expensive reprocessing. That's less fuel for us, more for everyone else. And just to help things out, if they ship ethanol back overseas after refining it here, our government gives the oil companies a nice big tax credit for helping to save the planet (and delete our food supply).

I'm upset over the prices too; A fill-up on my truck costs about $600-$700 (thankfully on a company card)! But you just don't kill many ducks by shooting the decoys. The speculators and the government (not via direct fuel taxes, but hidden tax incentives) are the ones to blame.

And as to how much is enough? At what point will you say to your boss "Thanks for the offer, but I don't want a raise. I make too much money already"?

TheRedneck

reply to post by TheRedneck


Starred

Even though you ruined my rant,there are factors there I didn't know about..




BLOODY SPECULATORS..
Will you just give it a rest...

reply to post by AGENT_T


I know what you mean, there must be a hell of a lot of storms battering them rigs for them to hike the price up so much.

Lucky for me I dont drive I ride a bike everywhere, this has my family worried though its eating into wages like termites through wood. add to this the ever increasing prices for gas and electric and the endless taxes where being bombarded with it wont be long before everyones on state run buses being shipped to and from work like good little proles.

It's good to hear you can claim your costs back, thats a small measure of victory...BAM! take that Mr Brown.

It is worrying to see this happening though, if this trend continues we will be nothing more than slaves to the rich and powerful.

Originally posted by fred3110
It is worrying to see this happening though, if this trend continues we will be nothing more than slaves to the rich and powerful.

That is exactly what we are now,with basic living costs eating all profits from your hard earned..

TAX on everything 5 times over..

Income tax.. you need your car to work.
Pay your road tax.. to use your car.
Pay your fuel tax.. to use your car
Tolls on tunnels " "
council tax...fix roads " "..


Really for another thread ........................ TAX!!!!!!!!


(You know how I get around this somewhat.. do a job I enjoy..hours I want.. make the basic survival amount ..to rob them the opportunity of stealing all your time and money..)

Excellent post TheRedneck you get a star from me to.

I didn't know about speculators but it makes sense when you lay it out like that, I'm sure I read somwhere that the british housing market was being manipulated to line the pockets of certain people invested in housing...must be them damn speculators. It sheds a whole new light on the situation.

thanks again for giving me the bitter reality of it

*spelling

[edit on 20-5-2008 by fred3110]

reply to post by AGENT_T


Yea I suppose we are, quite a depressing thought really! I wish I could be self employed...sadly I'm still an apprentice so I'll be a slave for another year at least

The only tax I really pay is on things I buy and what comes out of my wages, I consider myself lucky compared to others I work with who live miles away from work, they feel the pinch and I dont envy them!

I dont want to get started on council tax, the holes in my road are so big there like fox holes (exaggeration I know but they are huge)! the council rarely fix my area up and when the do its usually a complete bodge job.

It sounds like you have the good life nailed down, I hope I can get there one day.

reply to post by fred3110
Ah, good point (which I missed)! All the excuses floating around (there was a fire at a refinery, a quake in Illinois, a bird pooped on a pipeline) are plain and utter BS. While something like that might raise the price a few cents for a few weeks, it would have nothing like the impact we are seeing. This is all about covering up for the spectators and the fact that our dollar is dropping.

What's really sad is when people believe it.

TheRedneck