Begging for oil update. Saudi’s fail to raise output, but do raise prices. Who would have thought?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/saudi-arabia-raises-oil-prices-080827870.html
They’re just trying to help us fight climate change.
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Meanwhile, I know Biden is doing all he can to lower prices at the pump, but these guys have a few points of disagreement.
100 Ways Biden and the Democrats Have Made it Harder to Produce Oil & Gas
I’m not sure how your grocery stores work, but if something is on sale every week, it’s not a sale - that’s a regular price. There is always a sale on some particular cut of steak, pork, and chicken, and usually beef, but it isn’t necessarily the one you want that week. Around here, the particular cuts our family gets seem to coming up for their turn to be on sale less often (but maybe they just sell out more often, it’s definitely one or the other) and the sale prices are higher, just like the regular prices.
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And it goes beyond those direct reasons, too. Even if they decide to relax the obstacles to allow more production, no one is going to make the investment knowing that in 6-12 months it’s likely the rug will be pulled back out from under them.
It’s a big reason why a lot of Trump’s initiatives only had meager, if any, success - everyone knew that as soon as he was out of office, most of the changes would be reversed. It is perhaps our biggest problem - there’s the Democrat way or the Republican way that continuously ebbs and flows back and forth, instead of the American way that lets everyone move forward.
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It’s not about the exact dollar price - it’s about comparing one year to the next. Don’t look at the prices because they are aggregated and averaged across brands across geographic locations (very variable). Just assume since they used the same methodology as last year, the percentage difference is the significant number.
Especially for Piedmont.
Supermarkets heard you …
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Fed minutes
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FED MINUTES: PARTICIPANTS AT JUNE MEETING ‘CONCURRED’ THAT INFLATION OUTLOOK HAD DETERIORATED, WARRANTING HUGE 0.75-PERCENTAGE-POINT RATE INCREASE
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FED MINUTES: ‘MANY’ PARTICIPANTS JUDGED THERE WAS A ‘SIGNIFICANT RISK’ HIGHER INFLATION COULD BECOME ENTRENCHED IF PUBLIC QUESTIONS FED’S RESOLVE
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FED MINUTES: PARTICIPANTS ‘CONCURRED’ HIGH INFLATION WARRANTED ‘RESTRICTIVE’ INTEREST RATES, WITH POSSIBILITY OF ‘MORE RESTRICTIVE STANCE’ IF INFLATION PERSISTS
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FED OFFICIALS RECOGNIZED POLICY COULD SLOW GROWTH FOR A TIME
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FOMC Minutes: Fed Staff Saw Growth Rebounding in Second Quarter --WSJ
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FOMC Minutes: Staff Lowered Growth Forecast for Second Half of 2022 and 2023 --WSJ
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Reminds me of mainstream diatribe of the benefits of being unemployed, circa 2010. Sadly, the UN has apparently caught on you to @xerty. The link is dead (or my browser is) …
Our Central Planning Commander in Chief is going around telling businesses to become non-profits and sell at cost. Guess we got a socialist after all.
https://mobile.twitter.com/POTUS/status/1543263229006254080
Meanwhile, we’re selling a decent chunk of our Strategic Midterm Reelection Reserve to… China.
…which will somehow cause the price at the pump here at home to drop (it hasn’t), cause Sinopec to sanction Russia and not buy their oil (it hasn’t), and definitely not benefit Hunter Biden’s shady foreign investments in that company (TBD, but the media and the DOJ’s foreign agent registration enforcement sure aren’t looking).
Bidenomics!
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Most gas stations sell gas at close to cost as it is, if not a slight loss. It is one of the few retail categories where a set retail markup percentage are not used. If the companies running gas stations were to change their pricing strategy to reflect the product cost, pump prices would only increase even more. I’m sure there are some random exceptions, as there always is, but gas stations are in no way profiteering off the current price of gas; at best they’re still making the same ~$.10/gallon they were making when the pump price was $2.00.
It has helped, since every extra barrel sold leaves another barrel on the market for someone else to buy. It may not have caused prices to decline noticably, but had this SPR oil not been released, oil prices would’ve been even higher than they were since whoever bought it would’ve instead been competing to buy what others bought.
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Sure, but if he Cared About America, he could have sold the SPR barrels only to US based firms. Sure they’d get less money from a less competitive market, but then at least they’d be benefiting America instead of China with their political pandering.
It’s a bad look and gives their opponents political talking points (soft on China, 10% via Hunter) so it just seems so incompetent politically, as well as largely incompetent economically also. We’ve been getting a double dose of both lately.
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Of course. I’ve said since day one that the only way we can really lower our oil prices independant of global prices is to bypass the global market and restrict who we sell to directly. It’s essentially what Russia has been forced to do, except that global prices have gone up so much that even their discounted off-market sales have rather lucrative pricing.
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I find this hard to believe when Costco charges $5.50 while Chevron a few miles away wants $6.70. I’ve seen stations across the street from each other with a $0.30/G difference.
I imagine the inconvenience of selling gas at a .10 markup is worth it to get to sell coffee and soda at 400% markups,
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Biden energy policy isn’t exactly EU friendly. One of our major LNG (nat gas) export facilities is down recovering from a fire, which killed about 1/6 of our export capacity. You can see who should be worried - Italy and Germany for sure. Mexico told us to stuff it on our Russian sanctions, and they’re open to buy from anyone.
Then the EPA is threatening to shut down another LNG export terminal over pollution issues.
Meanwhile, lease sales for more US drilling are being very limited under new Biden proposals, or possibly being canceled altogether, depending on how that plays out.
Meanwhile, hang onto your hats - that “incredible transition” comes at you fast.
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Hmm … I wonder what company Hunter is working for being paid by now?
They all get supplies from different suppliers (yes, even if a single truck is contracted to make deliveries to multiple stations, they have subdivided tanks). Those different suppliers have different refining costs, different futures strategies for obtaining their oil supply, etc, etc. It’s kind of like asking why the Mac and cheese in the supermarket is all different prices, when they’re all made from wheat.
The most applicable instance is where the refiner also owns the gas stations, in which case they can potentially manipulate supply costs to yield a low-margin retail operation (taking profits further back along the supply chain instead). But in general, a station’s priority is remaining competitive in the local market (which could be as small as a few city blocks) regardless of margin, since uncompetitive pump prices means no traffic at all.
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How about two Chevron stations a couple miles and $0.40/G apart ($6.30 and $6.70)? Surely they’re getting supplies from the same place at the same price?