Saturday 9 August 2008

Price Of Oil Falling

There is something strange going on at the local petrol station because the numbers on display of the exorbitant price the company charges for fuel has stopped whizzing around like the reels on a fruit machine.
Either the man who changes the numbers has keeled over from overwork and has gone to that great garage forecourt in the sky or incredibly, the price for petrol has stopped rising.
I am sure everyone can remember the likes of Shell and BP justifying stiffing us royally every time we went to fill up our petrol tanks by the rising price of oil. Even the Gas & electric suppliers got in on the act and said that they had no choice but to rise prices by 35% because of the oil price.
So now that oil prices have tumbled down from a record $147 a barrel at the start of last month down to $122, we can expect equally sharp falls in the pump prices can't we?
Far be it for me to want to strip away anymore of Centrica's £1b six month profit, times must be hard in the offices of the likes of British Gas as it is scraping by on £2b per year, but if the prices shot up so absurdly when prices where high, we should see them fall back again as the price lowers which could literally save peoples lives, especially the elderly who will face the probable situation of not turning on there central heating in winter to save money.
For all those people who tried to justify to me the rising costs to fill my car and warm my home whenever i bitch about the companies making massive profits at the cost of the people who can least afford it, how come the prices are not coming down in line with the price of a barrel of oil as quick as they went up or doesn't it work in reverse?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lucy,

In Texas the price of gas was $4.00US per gallon 4 or 5 weeks ago. I filled up two days ago for $3.54 US per gallon...

That would be about a 12% drop.

Q

Anonymous said...

Good post. The oil market is not competitive - it is a cartel and just SO manipulated.

The right love sucking up to big oil - supply and demand garbage. Even us in the banking business know it isn't supply and demand. It's all smoke and mirrors.

The Intolerant One said...

Yay! Now gas prices will only jump 5 cents a litre this week rather then 10 cents. ;P

Does anybody remember in the 70's when they were telling everybody that supply and demand were limited and that the planet was going to run out of oil in 5 years?

Today, Alberta, Canada has enough oil to sustain the planet for the next 400 years. Yet thru manipulative measures we have wonderful organisations, like OPEC, literally playing games just to see how high of a price they can get away with. It's not like they need the money afterall.

O' Tim said...

Still cost me 50 US bones to fill up today. Arrrgh!

Falling on a bruise said...

The prices here haven't changed at all since they went up by a few pence each day for about the past five weeks. You secretly getting your petrol from Venezuela Q?