Sunday, January 04, 2009

Gas Prices On The Rise, Again

I started tracking gasoline prices in my neighborhood in July, 2005, and put up my first post about the prices. Well, my first post was August 10, 2005, but for some reason, it is no longer on my blog. However, the post I put up on April 25, 2006, incorporates most of what I had in the missing post (perhaps I even moved it by mistake, who knows about Blogger, anyway). If you click on the tag for "gas prices," all of the posts I have on this subject will be readable at one time.

This past election, the price of gasoline started dropping, much as it had prior to the 2006 election (only to rise again, and surpass the drop, resulting in the all time high price of regular in Los Angeles area of $4.72). Understandably, I predicted the price would surge again after the 2008 election, but ... it didn't.

The economy really was in the shitcan, and the gasoline prices reflected that, dropping from the high of $4.72 in July 2008, to the low of $1.63 by November 2008! That's a whopping $3.09 drop in price over a four month period. I had not seen the price of gasoline this low since the beginning of the Bush term!

Nothing has really changed in the economy. It's not gotten better, in fact, it appears to be going further south, worldwide. And yet, yesterday, all the stations in the Los Angeles area that I saw had just raised their prices about 15 cents, with some stations back over the $2.00 mark for regular.

I guess the folks at Exxon Mobil, Shell, and the rest, are missing their $40 to $60 billion quarterly profits.

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