Katrina question

Sorry to burst your bubble but station owners don't have much control over street prices. They are TOLD what to sell it at, and are phoned and told when to change the prices.

The mom and pop gas stations that bought gas then sold it themselves are long gone.

At best, Mom and Pop might still own the building and run the store, but the pumps are leased out and run as a separate business that might give Mom and Pop a paycheck once a month.

AMUN

So you think gouging is ethical.

World oil wnet up $4 a barrel, or about 6% during the disaster while gas prices went up a 100%

Look at the fraction of the pump price that

Where did I say that? Many people want to have it both ways. I'm in favor of profits for every business though.

You must be right man, everything is nice and dandy. I wonder what these damn politicians are after?

No...as explained ad nauseum, global prices are set on and by the global major mercantile markets.

Amun wrote: ....

In the main, that's true--sorta...they can set the price wherever they want but they are pretty much at the mercy of the distributors to their cost which has at least some effect on their selling price...

That is true. Central chains dictate, yes but not how you want it to sound.

Not necessarily...the largest stations here all independently owned/operated.

That is simply not universally true. I don't, in fact, know of anywhere around here that it true.

Not totally independent if you'll simply look at the mercantile exchange closing prices for the two commodities you'll find they're quite highly (positively) correlated.

And I said local prices are "affected by" not totally controlled by...

Press and political advantage, mostly...

And those prices are either fixed in the short term or are a percentage of the retail price (taxes). That proves nothing. It still remains that the full retail price at the pump is manipulated independent of the wholesale price of oil or gasoline.

Mike

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Ant that is still a positive correlation...it would be difficult to conceive of them being totally independent as one is the raw material for the other.

And, of course, I started this subthread branch by pointing out that there are open markets for both products...

As LtGen Honore said: "If you've ever had 20,000 people to dinner, you'd know."

First, a natural disaster is the responsibility of the state. The federal government can do nothing, nothing, unless officially requested by the state. The feds COULD nationalize the National Guard, but that requires congressional action and the Congress was on vacation when Katrina hit. The president COULD order the regular army in, but under Posse Comitatus laws, they have, legally, no authority whatsoever.

There's a political calculus afoot, too. The governor of Mississippi declared martial law on Monday. The governor of Louisiana did not do so until Thursday. Even today, the mayor of New Orleans is holding forth from his 26th floor suite at the Hyatt.

Here's the deal: In my city, the average time for the first piece of equipment to arrive at a fire is FOUR MINUTES after the alarm is called in. In a major disaster, a more realistic time frame is four DAYS for significant help to arrive. Consider moving 2 million MREs from a warehouse in Illinois to southern Louisiana. A day to find and load thirty

I recall after 9-11, a small town in North Carolina donated a fire truck to the New York fire department to replace some of the equipment lost in the tragedy. It wasn't a super-dooper truck, but it was all the small city could do. The truck was placed in service and, as far as I know, is still doing what it can. Point is, it took a week from the time the idea was broached for this one little truck to arrive in the Big Apple.

I'm in Houston and we're housing some 40,000 refugees. Consider the Astrodome: Events had to be re-scheduled, some 1000 dome employees had to be activated to handle the physical plant, union contracts had to be negotiated, supplies laid in (you try finding 20,000 cots and getting them delivered today), food, water, clothing, medical care, schools, communications, ancillary showers and sanitary facilities, ad infinitum. Then there's the ripple effect throughout the community. The Houston police department cancelled vacations and leaves. Hospitals in the area started their emergency preparedness plans. In just one day, the city's need for Insulin supplies doubled.

The Normanday Invasion took a year to plan and involved HALF as many people (and none of them sick).

No, a response time of a week for significant assistance is reasonable. Regrettable, even fatal to some, but reasonable.

Go for it. Since the Carter oil-crunch in the 70's, there have been at least SEVEN congressional investigations of oil companies. The Congress even passed an "excess profits tax." In all those inquiries there has never been any evidence of wrong-doing unearthed. No collusion, no gouging, no conspiracy. Nothing.

Politicians easily show "leadership" after tragedies. Bah!

The answer is, it's *NOT* taking very long, it's taking about as long as one would expect for a major, large-area disaster.

There are independant gas stations. There are even independant gas-stations that don't rise their prices when people start to panic. Those are the ones that had 3-mile lines on the first day, and have been out of gas ever since.

--Goedjn

Nice story, but I doubt it's the whole story...

highly

Short term fluctuations are not unusual...just look at the data over a period of time...

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Gasoline futures surged 14 percent last week while crude oil prices gained only 2 percent.

I don't, know but who did the asking and why? If he wants to sell at a loss, that's his business. Knowing several independents here and the local distributors, something just doesn't add up...

Sorry, that's hard to parse--misplaced comma.

I meant that I don't know "the rest of the story", but...