Analyst says 'greed' main factor behind steadily rising fuel prices

From the "Well, duh!" department.

Yeah...sun's hot and rain's wet as well.

It's less the oil companies than it is the speculators at the fuel/commodity pricing boards that are doing this. The North American commodity pricing boards used to be governed more by actual production costs and commodity availability. If a refinery was shut down for repair/expansion work then of course the price would rise until it was back online. Now though commodity pricing boards are increasingly controlled more-and-more by the Wall Street type of speculating and frat-boy guesswork and far less by day-to-day industry reality.

There's no reason at all, not even the recent Venezuela refinery explosion or the antics of the rioters in the Arab states, that justifies these types of price hikes in a insular market like Canada. As such there has to be another reason, like the near-criminal activities of an unregulated and thoroughly irresponsible financial sector, that is usually behind this kind of pandemic of larceny. That the banker and hedge-fund locusts have moved on to loot the commodities markets after they finished stripping the flesh off the housing and mortgage markets is probably the simplest and most accurate answer available.

So lets drag them out into the streets and whip them, like was done to evil people in the past.

whip.gif

I like the dead peasant insurance hedge funds. With those ones, the earlier you can make your workers die, the more money you make!

Greed is good. What, the oil companies and speculators are going to voluntarily make less profit than is possible? I mean with the outrageous tax burden that the rich carry, they've gotta try to squeeze every nickel out of the economy they can. To paraphrases Psudo, have the rich not suffered enough?

Shame we don't operate a nation fuel corporation.

Every time I hear some asshole say "But retailers are hardly making any profit!" I want to hit that person with brass knuckles with the words 'speculators' and 'refineries' on them.

Well c'mon now. Other corporations have an unfair advantage cuz they can move their operations off shore to try and maximize profits. The poor oil industry in Canada is stuck paying human wages and benefits, along with making sure there is appropriate workplace safety.
I feel for these poor guys, having to "pay extra" just to extract resources from a 1st world country. It's just not fair.

Wait. I thought it was the other way around.

We did. It was called "Petro-Canada."

And I would not trust the government to manage a lemonade stand given how that means the rise a bureaucracy where there is always a pencil-pusher there to take their cut. Prices would probably double if we had a "national fuel corporation."

Petro-Canada
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro-Canada

Since it was government owned, they were also double dipping. Not only did they set the price but they also received the tax revenue on it based on a percentage of the sale price. Not much incentive for them to reduce the prices either.

Of course the fuel industry is crooked. That's what happens when you have many sellers selling exactly the same product. Collusion is bound to occur in unregulated perfectly competitive markets. Without collusion, profit margins are too small to support many sellers.

But I think what aggravates consumers' colons more than anything are the swings in price, seemingly without reason. What I would propose is that once a gasoline retailer puts a price on their sign, they aren't allowed to change it for 30 days. Take the swings out of the pricing and make retailers announce their prices, forcing some measure of competition on a market that should be competitive. Right now it's a gigantic collusive conspiracy.

I think this is a great idea, but 30 days might be a little long. I think it might take away too much of their flexibility to respond to things like refinery breakdowns. A week or 10 days would probably work though.

Well I was hoping that we might have a national fuel corporation that was going to drive down the price to something a lot closer to cost.

But as you pointed out what we got was a government cash grab, because direct income is easier to calculate than indirect.

How do you measure cost? When you factor environmental costs, gas is a goddamn bargain at $1.50/L.