Lynne Kiesling Like “price gouging”, “windfall profits” is an economic non-concept that rears its ugly head in the political machinations surrounding exogenous economic dislocations like national disasters. Senators Cantwell and Dorgan, who are sensible on some other, electricity-related, energy issues, really get it wrong here. Steve Chapman’s column on the topic points out the economic …
Lynne Kiesling It’s been brewing for several years, but finally the $66/barrel oil prices have induced Hawaii to impose a cap on the wholesale price of gasoline. On Wednesday, the state’s Public Utilities Commission released its first weekly list of price caps for different parts of the state. Including taxes, the maximum wholesalers in Honolulu …
Lynne Kiesling Last week while I was off philosophizing, the Federal Trade Commission released a new report on the factors that influence retail gasoline prices (hat tip to Todd Zywicki). The FTC watches retail gasoline prices carefully, and every spring like clockwork when prices go up and my Senator (that would be Dick Durbin) rails …
Lynne Kiesling Over at Truck and Barter, Kevin has a post on Wal-Mart’s next victims now that they’ve stomped all over the large toy store model. One of the next victims that Forbes names is retail gasoline. Retail gasoline is a natural extension of the Wal-Mart business model. Sourcing the product through a distributed supply …
Okay, let’s review. In the last two weeks of August we had 1. a burst pipeline in Arizona 2. six refineries out of service for up to a week because of the blackout 3. an impending Labor Day holiday So the increase in gasoline prices was the result of price gouging, right? At least that’s …
Yet Another Federal Investigation Of Gasoline Price Spikes Read More »
According to this preliminary Energy Information Administration report on California gasoline prices. I really want to paste in an excerpt here, but they’ve set Acrobat so I can’t copy text (grrr), so here’s the punch line: after you take out last year’s crude oil price spike, these factors conspired to raise gasoline prices: -refineries producing …
California Gasoline Prices Are High For Good Reason Read More »
Crude oil prices are the highest they’ve been in 12 years, and the Iraq situation is only one reason, as I’ve been saying for months and as this Business Week Online article points out. High oil prices and their translation into high gasoline prices have produced their usual response from Midwest politicians — a request …
Ya wanna increase fuel economy and reduce our dependence on oil? Let high gasoline prices do their work. From an article in the Press Enterprise (registration required), an inland Southern California newspaper: Amid soaring gas prices nationwide, Californians are paying the most to fill up their vehicles, causing many people to cut back on recreational …
I haven’t focused on it much here, but the FERC had set the wholesale “soft price cap” in California to rise from $91.87 to $250 today. As this article reports, the new price cap has been delayed a month to allow officials to incorporate changes from a computer test of manipulation possibilities. Of course, this …
What’s New With The California Wholesale Price Cap? Read More »
I wonder if California’s politicians will ever stop externalizing all of the responsibility for their failed electricity restructuring. Now they are moving beyond placing all of blame on Enron and other “greedy, out-of-state, price gouging” power suppliers to Perot Systems, the company that wrote the software to implement California’s failed “market” design and made marketing …
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