The dollar sign should be a hint. In case you are wondering, this is the euro sign: €. Also, normally we don't use gallons.
€1.72/litre, which is $2.23/litre, which is around $8.92/US gallon I think. Gas prices have gone way up during the last year here in Greece. That, along with the fact that sallaries have gone way down is a serious problem, because public transporation is virtually non-existant in most places. I fondly remeber the days when gas prices were around €1.10/litre - and an average sallary was around €900 and not €580...)
Last Friday ...... $3.229 per gallon Monday ...........$3.499 per gallon This morning .... $3.699 per gallon WTF is going on with gas prices in NW Ohio? More than a $0.40 jump in less than 6 days!?! It cost me $55 to fill up last night. I'm really getting sick and tired of being ripped off by the oil companies ............ Q2
Consider yourself lucky, mate. I pay twice that. Triple if I buy super unleaded. Unfortunately, my car is mapped for su and it runs like shit on regular. It runs well enough on premium i suppose. But I'm very picky... Btw, the second incarnation of Lady B lives!
It's not the oil companies, it's international demand. China needs more and more oil, and production can't increase fast enough to keep up. Result: higher prices across the board. Prices in the US are still vastly lower than in Europe, though.
Even with all that, gas--according to one report I saw on TV--should only be $1.37 a gallon in the US. What's really pushing gas prices through the roof are market speculators who keep driving the price of oil up by predicting future low supply and increased demand. And nothing can be done about it unless the demand for oil goes down.
I'm not an expert in these issues, but blaming oil's price on futures market speculation strikes me as a specious argument, and in fact your very accurate last sentence undermines the thrust of the argument of the previous paragraph. As long as a market is sufficiently liquid & large (and both Brent & WTI futures markets are generally very liquid and large), the effect of speculation should be irrelevant over the long term as the market will price the asset correctly on average. Fuss about speculators driving an asset's price misses the point. (Off topic, but this is also why bans on short-selling equities during the height of the financial crisis were ineffective in stemming volatility & steep falls. All it did was raise anxieties further & slow down the rate of change, thus effectively prolonging it.) If there is futures speculation that subsequently isn't borne out by the fundamentals, the bubble will be followed by a crash. This in fact is exactly what happened when prices exponentially rose to $147 back in 2007, before the financial crash fed through to massive demand destruction and a subsequent rapid collapse in the oil futures price. On average, over the cycle, the price was an accurate reflection of the fundamentals despite the spikes and troughs. This is not the case in all commodity markets. For instance, it's quite possible to "corner the market" in other commodities. Someone managed this in physical cocoa last year or the year before IIRC. That can lead to significant genuine price distortions due to the effect on market liquidity. Another example of such price distortion is the aluminium market. A few large financial organisations own massive warehouses that store the metal as well as trading it on the markets. The implications are obvious: they can buy the metal direct from the manufacturer, store it in the warehouse, and only slowly drip-feed it to the end consumer, thus controlling supply by acting as a bottleneck in the process, driving up prices whilst at the same time trading contracts for the metal they hold on the market. Their ability to warehouse truly vast quantities of the metal distorts the world market by affecting liquidity. IIRC, the LME is trying to figure out how to stop this, but don't think they've had many good ideas yet. The problem is that the aluminium producers love the steady and predictable stream of purchases from GS and the other houses that do the warehousing. But oil futures are non-physical and generally large/liquid enough to allow for long-term average accurate pricing. (The unspoken caveat to this is that the market must be transparent as well as liquid, but oil futures aren't bad in this regard either.) The essential reason the average oil price is rising over time is based on fundamentals: oil is getting increasingly expensive to extract over time and global demand is rising over time. This also has a multiplicative effect, if you think about it, as oil is a sufficiently significant energy source that it also costs oil (energy) to extract oil and transport oil, which means if nothing is done, the cost should rise along a logarithmic (I think, my maths isn't great, might just be a power) curve. This is not a pleasant prospect... The routes out of this are not to fret about the very transitory effects of market speculation as it's not the fundamental cause of the price rises, but rather to continue to develop other technological solutions to extract energy (e.g. fission, fusion, renewables, whatever) that may reduce the unit cost of energy over time, and in parallel develop technologies to permit increasingly efficient usage of current resources to mitigate the rising cost of each unit. All the above is in reference to futures pricing. Of course, the degree to which futures prices changes are transmitted to a specific location's forecourt is subject to a host of other issues (logistical issues, local competition, attempts by a company to smooth price fluctuation, overall sales strategy, etc, etc.) As I say, I'm no expert, but I think that worrying about market speculation runs a severe risk of missing the wood for the trees when it comes to figuring out the cost of an asset. It's very short-termist.
If I may ask, what the hell do you drive? 'Cause my mam's Astra sounded like an asthmatic elephant with a car up its arse when she filled it up with 87 octane. And that bloody thing even runs on shitty romanian petrol. I dont even want to think about what my merc would do if i ran it on 87octane. Its mapped on 102 octane race fuel. Barely runs on 95.
87 works fine in some engines, and is crappy in others. Don't put 87 in a Mercedes or a BMW, but it's no problem at all in a Chevy or a Honda.
Its not a matter of brands, its a matter of how the car is mapped and the engine's performance. Mine runs like crap even on 95 octane, but that's because its mapped running 102 octane race fuel. Besides, i gotta feed the 370 ponies... I doubt 87 octane would be a problem for my mates 89bhp Dacia Sandero. Still, that 87 octane crap gives me the chills.
Keep it mind that North America uses a different octane rating than Europe. The NA number is typically 4-5 points lower for the same type of fuel.
Yeah, my (American) car runs fine on 87. Why the fuck do I want to pay 10 cents more a gallon for 89? It doesn't really do much for my fuel economy.