/bangs head on desk.

Tomorrow's Head line...

Lone Trader stabbed in the face with a gas pump while filling his Hummer with Premium. Critical condition.

Some people don't deserve the money they have. Nuff said..

There are certain commodities that are too important to life and the economical health of the planet to be played with by speculators.

Oil is certainly one of them.

Speculators will arbitrarily raise their price to whatever they think the market will bear and automatically do so on the slightest hint of a possible interruption/downturn in production whether real or imagined. Some important commodities like milk are exempt from this kind of knee jerk fluctuation. Oil and it's importance to everyone should be protected also.

Speculators have created the havoc which is the current housing market, they continue to have no moral fibre and continue to cause problems in every market they can successfully manipulate.

What A douche. I hope he gets whats coming to him.

Does he want a cookie?? Seriously I will mail him a cookie.

Mail him this cookie

Seriously now, can you Americans STOP whining about fuel prices, come over to the UK and you'll realise how good you have it.

[edit]
In fact, replace the word fuel with just about anything!

Karma has a good way of finding idiots like this guy. Hope nobody nice is standing close when it hits.

.... and charge him for it. I will be the first person to charge $100 for a cookie.

Personally, I blame the dollar for the inflated oil price, simply because the dollar is pretty much worthless these days.

The dropping dollar is part of the problem with the rise in oil prices. Oil is traded in dollars so the cost does go up and down with the value of a dollar. If you get paid in Euros there should be almost no change in the price of oil for you as the Euro is still up against the dollar.

As for complaining about the price of petrol in Europe, that's taxes at work, not the free market.

Last year when some economists were predicting $100 oil people poo pooed the idea. They were not thinking that the price would rise due to the dollar's value dropping. In reality, the price of oil is not moving that much, it is just the value of the dollar has dropped so low.

Why should anyone stop complaining about a world necessity that's artificially fluctuating?

As for the British petrol prices, that's a tax added problem you have, not the actual cost of petrol.

If you notice, in America, as soon as a hurricane hits the Gulf of Mexico, or there is some combat in an oil producing area, even in Africa, the prices on the pump go up.

There's absolutely no financial reason to increase the price of gas already paid for and it has little to do with the value of the dollar.

In fact there is no reason to increase the price on the mere hint of a problem except to increase the bottom line.

If the actual cost of production of gasoline has increased to justify today's prices how come the oil companies continue to make record profits?

There is another factor to consider.

There is currently only one operational oil refinery in the US. There were more in the past, but the oil companies closed them down. It doesn't matter how much oil we have when there is an artificial bottleneck at the point where it gets turned into gasoline.