Not being able to think of a more believable name than "Matthew Phoenix" should be an additional charge.
High prices. Besides the pandemic year it was the lowest summer demand for gasoline since the 90’s which lead to a built up inventory of gasoline.
I believe gas demand has dropped. Have to think inflation plays some part in that, leading to drop in gas prices. Also have to think that the world accepting the current state of Russia/Ukraine has taken some of the fear out of the commodity as well.
I just have to wonder if this wasn't an engineered domestic price spike to make up for losses during the pandemic. And it was engineered by not ramping back up refining until the price rose.
I saw 6.89 on the east side of Glacier when I was out there. That threw the whole family for a shock.
I don't know about oil/gas industry specifically but I'd imagine the answer for this type of thing in general might be: 1) As our entire government/financial system has gotten more corrupt in the past 20 years there's a lot of things corporations are doing now that they likely could not have 20 years ago 2) There's just no shame anymore and it's gotten way worse since the onset of covid.
To be clear, I don't think these companies even lost money from COVID at this point. I think they've made up the difference between shortfalls and the boon of the past several months. How amazing!
refiners generally don’t make big money. It’s more like a supermarket model. They tend to lose money every decade or so when unexpected things happen. There’s a reason why all the major oil companies spun off their refining operations.
“Financial system” was a poor term to use on my part. There are a million examples available though to demonstrate that we’ve been backsliding in terms of being able to introduce or enforce regulations that prevent corporations from doing all manner of shit that they should not be doing that is ultimately harmful to consumers/the country as a whole, whether directly or indirectly.
That’s because of cronyism and the politically powerful and large corporate players basically working together to control the game. We’re at a historical turning period for peak centralization and I think we’re about to see a decentralization movement. Hopefully that will fix a lot of our systematic issues and level the game a bit.
What makes you think decentralization is on the horizon? In some of the industries where centralization has been most extreme I could see it but on the whole I’m skeptical.
