European countries are small where you can travel by bicycle, walk, or take public transportation. That's not possible in the US where people have to drive an hour to get to work. Imagine trying to take public transportation to work each day. $8 gas would crush the US economy, assuming there is no other alternative.
Regarding rising gas prices the media are saying these things: CBS called it "bad news" "no matter what kind of gas is sold, today it's now unbelievably expensive" "What do you say to people who are losing patience with gas prices at $3 a gallon? And how much of a political price do you think you're paying for that, right now?" CBS suggested the President needed to "do something" about gas prices right now. NBC's Anne Thompson said that "no matter what kind of gas is sold, today it's now unbelievably expensive" Back to reality now...the average price prompting the soaring media concern was $2.62 and it was when Bush was president. Today mum is the word with the media since they no longer care about the "soaring" price of gas because the One is in office AND the stock market is up which does wonders for all the poor people.
If you come to a fork in the road you have to take it!! You can try to fix the system by voting in Obama for example.... Oh wait, he appointed the most Wall Street-centric cabinet ever, truly ever in the history of the United States... so nothing is getting fixed... "Workers of the World Unite" has been tried here and there on a massive scale over a hundred years of time and it's got a 100% failure rate so you can go for that.... IF YOU ARE A COMPLETE MORON... or, wow.. drumroll.... more drumroll.... LEARN TO TRADE! THIS IS A TRADING WEBSITE, many of us got our heads out of our asses and learned to trade!! Oh and, Karl Marx was right, the guys with the machines do make the money, learn to trade with a computer!!
The former President of Shell said last week that gas prices could likely rise to about $5 per gallon by 2012. And I'm sure the below info isn't helping much. Drilling Is Stalled Even After Ban Is Lifted By BEN CASSELMAN And DANIEL GILBERT More than two months after the Obama administration lifted its ban on drilling in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico, oil companies are still waiting for approval to drill the first new oil well there. Experts now expect the wait to continue until the second half of 2011, and perhaps into 2012...
So long as someone can explain to me how oil went from $147 to $38 in less than a year, I'll buy into the tired supply and demand argument. That's not to say that I don't believe it was the deciding factor say 10-20-30 years ago, I just don't believe it to be as much the case in the past decade. The move up to $147 and then back down to $38 threw a huge monkey wrench into that ideology.
Those are "price shocks" that have occurred every several years over the past dozen years or so (since crude oil bottomed at around $10/bbl in 1998). I remember in 2000 around the time that Enron had its tentacles everywhere that we had a few type of brief price shocks that subsided following 9/11. Then we had the same type of thing on an annual basis from 2003 onward with the war and the policy of dollar devaluation/asset reflation. The goal is obviously to de-sensitize everybody to "high prices" so that $3 per gallon or $4 per gallon becomes a new baseline high price. The problem is that there is so much volatility in commodity prices that many small to medium sized businesses without an arsenal of commodity hedgers at their disposal are at the mercy of this stuff.