12 replies to this topic

[Irongoat]

[attachment=1389:attachment]Deja Vu

[Jack of 32]

[Irongoat]

I spent the afternoon yesterday servicing my twenty year old Snapper riding mower. Spark pug, air filter, oil change, lube, new battery, and repairing a place on the grass catcher chute that I cracked last fall when I brushed by a tree.

It was an absolutely beautiful afternoon to be outside. The only down side was Rush Limbaugh. I have been listening to his show off and on for about sixteen years. Most of the time Rush is right on. Yesterday he spent 2 1/2 hours trying to defend the oil companies with their price increases.

With past price increases they had oil embargos, Katrina, low inventories, crude spikes and so on. This time around the refineries are brimming full, crude is high but not much higher. What we have is nothing but greed.

Even diehard Republicans are believing the charge that the President is in bed with the oil companies. Bush is not going to do anything about the price fixing monopoly.

When faced with a railroad monopoly and utility monopoly we welcomed government intervention. Now we must face the fact of oil company monopoly by price fixing.

Democrats, here is your chance to show that you can fix something. Get it right and you will be rewarded at the polls.

[Ghostman]

...and don't forget the confiscatory taxes. That would cut the price about in half.

err, ah, I guess we loose that party there, don't we? Come to think of it, we loose both parties there.

[Buddy Kidd]

Who here believes it is the Oil Companies which set the price of a barrel of Oil?

[Irongoat]

Buddy Kidd, on Mar 14 2006, 01:42 AM, said:

Who here believes it is the Oil Companies which set the price of a barrel of Oil?

The point is, they set the price(together) of gasoline. That's price fixing. That's illegal and our Republican government won't do anything about it because they are in bed with the oil interest.

I'm a Republican, a Conservative and smart enough to know cheaters when I see them. The oil companies are price fixing. Bush won't do anything about it. We can speculate as to why. Follow the money would be a good place to start.

[Buddy Kidd]

Oh, I was just wondering because of your first your first post. I also wonder why I see as much as a dime / gal difference in the price of gasoline as I drive across town.

[Irongoat]

Buddy Kidd, on Mar 14 2006, 02:12 AM, said:

Oh, I was just wondering because of your first your first post. I also wonder why I see as much as a dime / gal difference in the price of gasoline as I drive across town.

Around here there are stations in the the high rent district that have always charged a dime or more per gal more than most suburban areas.

Stations in my middle income area are all over-charging pretty much the same.

[Psycmeistr]

A good portion of the price of oil right now is the "fear premium"... translating probably to around 40 cents per gallon of gas or more.

The fear of cuts in supply makes the gasoline on hand that much more valuable and in demand, thus raising the prices paid, even though supplies are actually at present stable.

Pretty good time to have an oil field in your backyard.

[Buddy Kidd]

[Jim Miller]

We will know the price of gas is too high when the underground tanks are overflowing.

[Buddy Kidd]

Oil profits, prices and politics

Nov 3, 2005

by Alan Reynolds

A When the unsurprising news came out that big oil companies had big profits, Bill O'Reilly of Fox TV concluded: "My contention is the oil companies don't have to double their profits. They can maybe make them two-fifths (40 percent). Take a little less for the good of the nation."

Exxon-Mobil's recent profit margin was up to nearly 9 percent of sales. Suppose they tried to cut that to a nickel out of every dollar by offering to sell crude oil for $3 a barrel less than the going price on the Chicago mercantile exchange. Refiners around the world would instantly commit to buying every drop. By the next day, the world price of crude would be same as before.

Suppose the Big Five oil companies got together and agreed to cut retail gasoline prices at their company-owned stations by 20 cents a gallon. Motorists would soon drain those stations dry, leaving the much larger number of independent gas stations in a position to charge even more. Meanwhile, independent station owners would file a complaint with the antitrust division of the Department of Justice accusing the majors of collusive predatory pricing to drive them out of business.


If prices or crude oil and gasoline really rise and fall at the whim of U.S. petroleum companies, why would oil and gas prices ever fall? Texas crude fell to $12 in February 1999. Was that because U.S. oil companies suddenly became less greedy?

"Average U.S. gasoline price tumbles to $2.48 a gallon," was a recent headline at USA Today, noting gas prices had dropped by at least 55 cents. The price of crude oil dropped 9.8 percent in October. The Dow Jones stock index for oil and gas companies fell 9.2 percent. On the futures market, natural gas prices fell 18 percent in a single week.

O'Reilly's spin zone had to spin a new theory. He now argues that while prices rose because of some inexplicable hurricane of greed, they subsequently fell because "the oil companies have been scared into lowering prices of oil." He claims to know "the worldwide demand for oil is the same today as it was eight weeks ago. But oil prices are declining -- so what gives? Fear. That's what gives. Millions of Americans are angry with big oil and are buying less fuel."

Excuse me? If millions of Americans are "buying less fuel," how could demand be the same? Trying to spin his way out of that paradox, O'Reilly differentiated "worldwide" demand. But worldwide demand must be entirely irrelevant unless domestic prices of oil and gasoline are set by supply and demand in worldwide markets, rather than by corporate caprice.

Yet O'Reilly says, "The truth is that the American oil companies set the domestic price of fuel based upon what they think they can get away with." But if domestic oil and fuel prices were set by domestic oil companies, why even mention world demand? And if only American oil companies are fixing prices -- up or down depending on their mood -- then why are those prices identical, both here and abroad, at British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell?

In reality, O'Reilly could not possibly know whether or not "worldwide demand for oil is the same today as it was eight weeks ago." The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates world demand by the month, and its latest was for September. "Chinese apparent demand is again revised down," said the IEA. "Spot gasoline prices were pressured (downward) on record U.S. imports." If only they could accept O'Reilly's notion that American oil companies set prices wherever they like, then the IEA could just stop collecting such bothersome facts.

If you sell your house for much more than you paid for it, you will receive a "windfall profit." When you take that windfall from selling your old home and go out shopping for a new one, however, you'll discover prices of replacement homes have gone up, too. That may explain why the Senate has not yet contemplated imposing an extra "windfall profits tax" on windfalls homeowners receive when selling their homes. Since 1997, in fact, couples can pocket half a million dollars of such windfalls tax-free.

Aside from the tax break on homes, something very similar happens in any business whenever the price goes up for something bought earlier at a lower price. Businesses that process raw materials hold inventories of those materials, for example, and those inventories may have been purchased for much less than the current price. When the book value of those inventories is adjusted to reflect today's higher price, accountants add that difference to the firm's profits. But this is called "inventory profit," because those paper gains will soon be needed to replace the raw materials at the new, higher price. Then they vanish.

The oil industry holds a lot of inventory, and we should be glad it does. If an oil company stockpiled a lot of oil at $40 -- before it rose to $60 -- that is going to look almost as good (on the books) as the sorts of windfalls we've seen on home sales in Las Vegas. Since gasoline prices also rise whenever crude does (partly because crude accounts for half the cost), products refined from the cheaper $40 crude will also be unusually profitable for a while. But this is like making money on the house you sold but needing every dollar to buy a replacement home. Prices of oil likewise have to reflect replacement costs, and the resulting one-time surges in inventory profits are not a problem, but part of the solution.

On second thought, perhaps I should not have brought up this analogy between "windfalls" on oil and homes. Certain senators are looking for any excuse to tax anything. I surely do not intend to encourage such political pillaging.


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