should gov't do anything about oiul specularors driving up price of oil??

[jollyman069]

One week before President Obama took the oath of office gas here in my part of Maryland was $1.39 a gallon. Today 4 days after the even gas prices here are now $1.85 per gallon. Now before someone goeas nuts i am not blaming President Obama for this problem. The business news is all reporting that oil speculators(merrill Lynch being the largest buyers) are buying up all this oil and running the price sky high again. Barrell of oil was down to $33.00 a barrell..now it is up over $45.00 a barrell..Shouldnt our gov't step in and stop this practice.. Merill Lynch is one of the companies getting billions of dollars is TARP money from us tax payers. What they are doing is lining there pockets and nmaking the tax payer suffer at the gas pump. President Obama will never be able to jump start the econmy with skyrockting gas prices. Now is it just me or does it seem like us the tax payers are getting the good ole hard one without being kised?? Would love to hear some other thoughts on this subject

[jollyman069]

What fries my cookies that these companies asking the gov't for billions of dollars so they can stay in business are the ones doing it> and the gov'[t isnt doing anything about it???

[HelpinUtah]

Our gas went up too!  UGH!!!!

[gwmclean]

The excuse this time is that since OPEC has reduced the amount of oil that it will produce, there will be less oil available for sale.  Since there is less of a product demand is speculated to rise.  If the demand rises, in theory people will pay more for the product. Hence why we have the price of gas jumping up.

In the summer we had the other end of the spectrum.  People we speculating that the demand for oil was going to far execeed what was going to be available.  This speculation as it turns out, wasn't based in anything but rumors and hopes.  And thats why we have seen oil run from 8/barrel in 2001-2002, right up to 150+/barrel at its peak this summer.

The real kicker is that the price of oil/barrel doesn't mean a thing.  That just a number that people would pay at the end of the month.  Oil investors are just betting that they are going to guess what the price of oil is going to be at at the end of the month.

[dominosarah]

Saw on the internet yesterday that some place in Arkansas gas was .97 cents.....Ours is 1.85......Barrels went down, our gas went up!!!!  Groceries here to are up again.....No kissing going on here either!!!!!!

[margypops]

I agree with you ,our gas as usual is up in CA and also the food prices keep climbing and were even when the gas went down, I believe the stores are doing some gauging , how can they say its the cost of the Gas when it was going down for weeks, even stuff like cans of soup that used to be cheap are a stupid price,I wont shop in the stores that do this I prefer to shop around.