two4theroad
Recycles dryer sheets
I found this article written by AP and thought some might like to see it.
AP IMPACT: What makes up the price of gas?: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
Excerpt from the article which sums it up.....
At the starting point of all this is the price of oil -- which, like the oil itself, is nothing if not crude.
The knee-jerk villains are the oil companies, fat with multibillion-dollar profits, frequent targets of populist anger. But wait: The oil companies don't set the price of oil or the cost of a gallon of gas.
Prices are a function of the open market, the result of futures contracts being traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange, or Nymex, and other exchanges around the world.
Buying the current July crude oil futures contract means you're buying oil that will be delivered by the end of July. But most investors who trade futures have no intention of ever accepting the underlying oil: Like stock investors who frequently buy and sell their holdings, they're simply betting that prices will rise or fall.
Of late, on the Nymex, oil futures have been rising.
Why? Blame the falling dollar. Oil is priced in U.S. dollars, and the weaker the dollar gets, the more attractive dollar-denominated oil contracts are to foreign investors -- or any investor looking for a safe haven in the turbulent stock market.
The rush of buyers keeps pushing oil futures to a series of new records, and the rest of the energy complex, including gasoline futures, has followed. That pushes up the price of gas that goes into your tank.
"Crude is the driver," said Jim Ritterbusch, president of energy consultancy Ritterbusch and Associates in Galena, Ill. "As long as it stays up there, gasoline's not going to be able to decline much at all, even if demand slips. That's just the way it is."
End Excerpt
So among other things, what they are saying is....WE, the investing public and our mutual funds, the ones who try to make a dollar and ten cents with our dollar, are part of the insanity.
2fer
AP IMPACT: What makes up the price of gas?: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
Excerpt from the article which sums it up.....
At the starting point of all this is the price of oil -- which, like the oil itself, is nothing if not crude.
The knee-jerk villains are the oil companies, fat with multibillion-dollar profits, frequent targets of populist anger. But wait: The oil companies don't set the price of oil or the cost of a gallon of gas.
Prices are a function of the open market, the result of futures contracts being traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange, or Nymex, and other exchanges around the world.
Buying the current July crude oil futures contract means you're buying oil that will be delivered by the end of July. But most investors who trade futures have no intention of ever accepting the underlying oil: Like stock investors who frequently buy and sell their holdings, they're simply betting that prices will rise or fall.
Of late, on the Nymex, oil futures have been rising.
Why? Blame the falling dollar. Oil is priced in U.S. dollars, and the weaker the dollar gets, the more attractive dollar-denominated oil contracts are to foreign investors -- or any investor looking for a safe haven in the turbulent stock market.
The rush of buyers keeps pushing oil futures to a series of new records, and the rest of the energy complex, including gasoline futures, has followed. That pushes up the price of gas that goes into your tank.
"Crude is the driver," said Jim Ritterbusch, president of energy consultancy Ritterbusch and Associates in Galena, Ill. "As long as it stays up there, gasoline's not going to be able to decline much at all, even if demand slips. That's just the way it is."
End Excerpt
So among other things, what they are saying is....WE, the investing public and our mutual funds, the ones who try to make a dollar and ten cents with our dollar, are part of the insanity.
2fer