Thursday, April 10, 2008

The California Black Gold Rush



Furious that President Bush has refused so far to press the big green button under his desk labeled "reduce crude oil prices by 20%," congresscritters Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, Rahm Emanuel of Illinois and Peter Welch of Vermont penned a sternly worded letter to the White House yesterday. This follows weeks of protests by truckers all over the country, but particularly in California, demanding the immediate suspension of the relationship between supply and demand, and calls by other elected officials not just to stop the massive supply crunch caused by the diversion of 0.7% of daily national consumption to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but also to open the spigot on the Reserve and let every drop of its 34.2 day supply crush oil prices down to $50 a barrel again, "where they belong."



Asked if a large part of the problem wasn't the dollar's poor exchange rate against, for example, the Euro, Markey, was hear to shout "Damn the Germans and David Hasselhoff!"



A quick review, however, reveals some interesting things about gasoline prices in California (see anything that gives you ideas?)