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Ben Tracy at CBS reports:
Gas prices are starting to rise again. The nationwide average is $2.37 a gallon, up 34 cents in the past month.
In Southern California, the price at the pump has spiked a record 79 cents, according to AAA. Drivers are lining up to fill up before prices go up again.
"Right now we're basically in the eye of the storm," says Allison Mac, an analyst with GasBuddy.com.
She says the problem is not the price of crude oil, which is holding steady at about $49 per barrel. The problem is at the refinery.
"In the industry we call this a first quarter climb. Every year around this time, nationally prices go up because we switch over to summer blend gas," Mac explains. "Summer fuel gasoline is actually more expensive to produce."
Refineries go through a maintenance cycle during the switch over. That means production is lower.
An explosion at the Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance, California, last week made things worse and a strike by steelworkers at 12 refineries across the country is impacting 20 percent of oil production...
Analysts say prices will jump another 15 to 20 cents in the next few weeks, peaking in late March. But gas prices are still about a dollar cheaper nationwide than they were this time last year.
Forbes Magazine has an interesting piece entitled “This New Libor ‘Scandal’ Will Cause A Terrifying Financial Crisis.”
ReplyDeleteThe vastly worse Libor “scandal” that I am referring to is the fact that the Libor has stayed at record low levels for the past half-decade, which is helping to fuel a massive economic bubble around the entire world that will end in a devastating financial crisis that will be even worse than the Global Financial Crisis. Instead of causing a few tens of billions of dollars worth of losses like the Libor rate-fixing scandal, the “Libor Bubble” will gut the global economy by trillions of dollars.
Here the the 1 month LIBOR rate compared to The Fed Fund target rate.
https://confoundedinterest.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/bubble-driver-this-new-libor-scandal-will-cause-a-terrifying-financial-crisis/