November 3rd, 2008. Why is gasoline so cheap again?

Ok, tomorrow is election day. I don't know if I posted this in the correct forum or not, but, somehow, I think this MIGHT be related.

Just a couple months ago, gasoline where I live in Iowa was up to $4.00+ per gallon. In the last couple weeks, it has plunged and I am now paying $1.94 per gallon (ethanol/unleaded blend).

Why is this? I know our economy has taken a nose-dive but is this really the reason?

[edit on 3-11-2008 by CreeWolf]

I can only assume falling stock prices have driven down the price of gasoline.

Hi Cree! I was going to write a similar post. I performed a search and found many posts relating to this one and assumed the mods would just move it. I hope they keep yours up as your title is the best to hit the point.
I'll make this short. You are asking the wrong question. You should be asking "what is that curtain" & "who behind the curtain". Oz is falling my friend. I am terrified as an orphan child left between the mentally handicapped and maximum security wards. Mommy?




~Hyp

Edit due to double post ( I dont know what happened)

[edit on 3-11-2008 by HypnoAsp]

Well, my guess is that the sudden inflation in the price of oil was totally bogus, perhaps? You do know that there's no oil shortage. It was all a scam. Haven't you noticed the pattern in all of this? It was rice a few months ago. Now and then, quite out of the blue there's a sudden and inexplicable shortage of something. It's arbitrary. Simply ignore it. Boycott whatever is being inflated and eventually they'll stop doing this to us. We're so stupid though that we fall for it every time!

Well its not just the US Economy on a nosedive. The price of gasoline is going down because the wold economy is slowing down. Basic law of Demand and Supply; there is more supply than Demand at the moment causing a downward pressure on the price of gasoline.

So who had over-inflated it? The oil companies? OPEC? With prices this low, Russia has got to be hurting too economically.

reply to post by rattan1


I pretty much just go back-and-forth to work now because of the price of commodities, utilities, etc. But, when I do fill up on gasoline, I don't notice any decrease in traffic or business on my route. I really don't think demand has changed that much. Is traffic congestion the same where you are rattan1? Have you noted a decrease?

reply to post by HypnoAsp

Yeah, forum placement seems to be pretty important around here. This is a sincere question I have. I thought I had a basic understanding of economics but I'm telling you, I do not notice a marked decrease in demand.

This is what I'm hoping to understand and your question helped clarify what I was asking. Who is behind this? Really? Thankyou HypnoAsp!

I'm waiting for the next elected idiot to take credit for this decline. I'm hoping this thread sticks around with the date originally posted to show that whichever idiot is elected is full of crap when they say "Look, I lowered gas prices!" Also, its obvious that George W. Bush is just "cruising" or I think he would have brought it up and tried to take credit for it. Congress? I don't really know what they've accomplished, but I haven't heard Nancy Pelosi taking credit for bringing the prices down either. What gives?

reply to post by CosmicEgg


Your thinking makes sense. I remember a few months ago when simply the "possibility" of the US increasing drilling was brought up, prices dipped. Of course, then Hurricane Ike or some other "excuse" brought the price back up again.

There's only one reason for any price to increase and that is *because the Illuminati want it to be so.* I wish this were total paranoia but I'm no Spring chicken here. I've been not just around the block but all over neighborhood and I can tell you that I've never seen a genuine shortage.

Do you remember when they needed to sell every country on the globe enough Tamiflu to innoculate the entire population? They said it was so expensive because there was a shortage of star anise which they need to grow it. I wandered around town here in the frozen north (yep, I'm just sub-arctic) and never found a grocery shop that didn't have a fair stock of it. The trouble is that we swallow what they feed us without even asking what it is. We lack any critical thinking whatsoever.

Do you think there's suddenly more oil or more rice or more star anise or more toilet paper? No. But there's no power of observation, there's no critical thinking, there's no asking questions and demanding answers (REAL answers) and there's no taking responsibility for our lifes and what happens therein.

We made this bed. We don't have to lie in it. Burn it and make a new one. We'll all be better for it.

I've said this on a simiiliar thread and I'll say it again. One of the first things that was done with George Bush as president, a bill that was co-written by someone(I forget the name) who quit after and went back to work at enron and Phill Gramm(responsible for the deregulation of the Mortgage market as well, also McCains economic adviser). The bill pretty much took away any regulation there was on the Energy future markets. Enron took it's chances right away by buying all the energy up, on paper and in real life, and diverting it to other states besides California. Creating those rolling blackouts that justified price gouging. If you havn't noticed by now there has been a sharp up tick in gas prices over the summer then a sharp downturn during the rest of the seasons. I think it's sort of like testing the water, and it really started hitting hard after Hurricane Katrina(when it first went up over $3.00 a barrel). But the long and the short of it is this, oil companies have been using proxies to artificially drive up the price of oil. If you remember people wern't even sure why that one guy pushed it over $100 a barrel. It's all about testing the waters and seeing how much we will put up with. Soon as the Economy collapsed and took the whole world with it, and politicians and people are calling for more regulation. They saw the writing on the wall and a lot of Speculators left the market.

Originally posted by CreeWolf
Ok, tomorrow is election day. I don't know if I posted this in the correct forum or not, but, somehow, I think this MIGHT be related.

Just a couple months ago, gasoline where I live in Iowa was up to $4.00+ per gallon. In the last couple weeks, it has plunged and I am now paying $1.94 per gallon (ethanol/unleaded blend).

Why is this? I know our economy has taken a nose-dive but is this really the reason?

[edit on 3-11-2008 by CreeWolf]

one step forward two steps back.
"gently" ...in steps.


-

I've been trying to figure this out for months....

-I belive the oil spike was contrived, and it was the trigger for the Global Fiat house of cards to start falling apart.

-No way the oil spike was from speculation....not over 100% increase...
Look at a yearly oil price chart....the spike looks like a heartbeat on a cardiogram...

-When gas prices were high, it started a rapid increase in foreclosures becuase 80% of the USA population is living paycheck to paycheck with ~10K on thier CC.

-Then a month after the oil peak of $147/B, then we have the greatest credit "issue" in history. (foretold by many)

IMHO, this is all by design, how far conspiritorial do you want to go?
From the presidential election influence all the way to NWO global currency....

Originally posted by Pinktip
I've been trying to figure this out for months....

-I belive the oil spike was contrived, and it was the trigger for the Global Fiat house of cards to start falling apart.

You're sort of on the right track here. But in no way was the movement (and subsequent loss of billions of dollars some dark, secretive and coordinated move by a conspiracy cabal).

-No way the oil spike was from speculation....not over 100% increase...
Look at a yearly oil price chart....the spike looks like a heartbeat on a cardiogram...

Actually, speculation would be a misnomer. It's more creating an environment to propel unrealistic, stratospheric, short-term returns as many investors and asset managers were used to receiving in the commercial paper market.

I've slugged this the plague of locusts (equating locusts here to hedge funds and private equity). This plague has been the primary, if not sole, reason we've seen one asset bubble after another for well more than a decade -- beginning with technology then leading to real estate.

Investors -- particularly high net worth families, pension funds and other institutional investors -- became hooked on fast rising returns during the dotcom bubble. When enough of this private capital came in, it created a situation where valuation of most internet companies and stocks was beyond any reasonable expectation that the money put in would ever be returned -- even if the tech company's wildest dreams were met. This drove up the price/earnings ratio of all of Wall Street, as charted here.

Once the bubble burst, billions of dollars were lost. The private capital percipitated this move-out and barely got out of the faltering market before 9/11 when the ground fell from beneath technology. Enter the second bubble. To prop up the ailing economy, brilliantly near-sighted and huberistic Alan Greenspan decided to slash interest rates to historic lows (right at 1%; sound familiar?). This had the net effect of making money -- and by extension, the dollar -- very cheap. The locusts now could leverage their vast reserves of capital using essentially free money. So, say a hedge fund with $10 million on its balance sheets could now realistically borrow another 100X that amount for little expense.

Oh, and 100X is actually extremely conservative, as one analyst pointed out the average hedge fund leverage was 3,000%! In other words, for every dollar a hedge held, it got a loan for $3,000.

Suddenly, private funds were cash rich, and desperate for a place to spend. Along comes the real estate lie. History had shown, until today, that real estate was able to show a steady, conservative return on the dollar over time, both commercial and residential properties. And what was better, unlike stocks, real estate is a limited commodity (you can't make more land, after all). Once banks got into the subprime game, the flood gates opened, and the locusts swarmed into real estate en masse, driving up values and prices to unprecedented proportions. This chugged along for nearly a decade, especially since hedge funds had an appetitie not for just owning the housing note of one single resident, but a pool of millions of residents, a commercial backed mortgage instument that promised to be like a bond -- returning a fixed amount because the risk was spread across millions of dollars worth of many properties instead of one.

This is a very long-winded explanation to get to your question: Why oil?
When the crash started late 2007, hedges and private equity saw the writing on the wall. And the locusts needed to get out and go elsewhere to get those short-term strong returns. Suddenly, commodities -- everything from oil and gas to lumber, corn, peas and freakin' carrots -- looked great. And their money dumped into that market in droves, driving up commodity prices to -- again -- unprecedented spikes. This is the reason we had $140 per barrel oil and corn and rice shortages. url=http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/05/29/8378002/index.htm]A story two years ago talking about hedge money moving into oil...[/url]

The reason commodity prices have crumbled is two-fold -- demand has significantly weakened as everyone in the world has become poorer (fueled by our depression). And second, hedge funds, facing an deluge of demand by account holders to cash out, have to liquidate to pay. So they attempted to drive up commodity prices, and then sell at the peak. And the overall depreciation of all assets is forcing even more selling by private equity funds as they struggle to drum up cash to pay back all those banks calling on their loans.

-When gas prices were high, it started a rapid increase in foreclosures becuase 80% of the USA population is living paycheck to paycheck with ~10K on thier CC.

Not really. As I stated earlier, foreclosure rates were hitting record levels as early as 2005, only the industry and America at large still were intoxicated by the success stories of our real estate mogels and idiots who wrote books encouraging the average American to go out and saddle themselves to fifty mortgages to buy properties and try to flip them in what will become the ultimate get-rich-quick ponzi scheme in history.

IMHO, this is all by design, how far conspiritorial do you want to go?
From the presidential election influence all the way to NWO global currency....

The design here is simply the collapse of history's greatest ponzi scheme -- a story of greed, ignorance, dramatic lies and the culpability of an entire government and banking industry hell-bent to keep America "prosperous" no matter the cost.

Okay. I'm done.

[edit on 11/5/2008 by behindthescenes]

The oil companies want you to forget about alternative energy by temporarily lowering their prices, and force the those new alternative fuel companies out of business, thus we continue to be oil dependent. Keep on pressuring your political representatives to invest in clean energy and do what you can to live as green as possible by the choices you make. You can make a difference.
www.oilwatchdog.org...

The oil patch knows the proverbial sh** is about to hit the fan. The people and politicians will start looking for scapegoats. But by the time they do, memories of this summer's price manipulation will have faded, and the ire will be directed elsewhere. Who can blame the oil patch when prices are at record(inflation adjusted) lows?