Gasoline in Atlanta | Hurricane Rita
Up in the N.W. Territories tonight, (Acworth), I saw more than one person filling up some major gasoline tanks with petrol. One guy tonight was filling up what looked like a 50 gallon drum in the back of his pickup truck with gas from the BP station. I ask him why he decided to buy $150 worth of gas and he said, he didn’t want to pay $5 a gallon next week when Houston’s refineries were shut down.
He said, “I can’t run even my small lawn business if gas goes to $5.00 a gallon, I don’t understand how any large business could stay around too long.”
All the work of Mother Nature and Hurricane Rita.
Actually all the work of the opaque pricing models of the oil companies. Even Bill O’Reilly pointed out the other day that nobody seems to know who sets prices for gasoline. When the republican far-right thinks something is wrong with the marketplace, something is really wrong.
There was a great story in the news the other day where an economist calculated the relationship between the price of oil and the price of gasoline and concluded there’s a huge disconnect.
All of this fits pretty well with a saying traders have- ‘buy on the rumor, sell on the news’. In other words, bad things might happen, price shoots up immediately.