Could be those nasty Eurozone instability concerns.

No mater the reason, the good news is that gasoline is down to an ave. price of $3.76/gal (except in 9 states and I happen to live in one of them).

Just FYI, the US produced 9.5 million barrels of crude per day in December, while consuming 18.5 million barrels of petroleum products. Guess we are just plain stuck with imports.

Here are the points of interest:

The president will call on Congress to:

• boost spending on technology to improve oversight and surveillance of energy markets.

• increase by six times the money spent on surveillance and enforcement staff of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to better deter oil market manipulation.

• increase from $1 million to $10 million civil and criminal penalties against firms that engage in market manipulation.

• in an effort designed to limit energy market disruptions, give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission authority to increase the amount of money that a trader must put up to back a trading position.

Of course this is a political move, and Republicans will never go along with it.
What the heck? It can’t hurt to try.

I found a very informative article from How Stuff Works on what else? – How Gas Prices Work

The introduction gives a good overview of the gas price situation. I also found interesting The Breakdown of Gas Prices. In other words: Who gets what piece of the pie, and how much?

There has actually been little impact on global oil supply because of the tougher sanctions on Iran. The US market is well supplied – enough oil in storage tanks to cover 57.5 days of demand.

Just tell that to the speculators on Wall St. Goldman Sachs says that heavy speculation does have an effect on oil prices. In fact,

Goldman’s oil analyst wrote in a note last month that every million barrel equivalent of oil futures that was net long the market adds 10 cents to the price of oil. The market is currently net long US benchmark crude, or WTI, by 258,406 contracts which is equivalent to 258 million barrels of oil. At 10 cents per every million barrels, that would mean speculation is currently adding $25.80 to every barrel of oil — without the excess speculation, oil would trade at around $81.52.

Which way do you see oil prices going?

Although apparently Obama and PM David Cameron discussed the matter, no agreement was reached.

Pump prices not going anywhere soon.