{"id":643,"date":"2008-09-10T23:18:18","date_gmt":"2008-09-11T04:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/?p=643"},"modified":"2008-09-10T23:19:59","modified_gmt":"2008-09-11T04:19:59","slug":"gasoline-price-levels-vs-crude-oil-price-levels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/2008\/09\/gasoline-price-levels-vs-crude-oil-price-levels\/","title":{"rendered":"Gasoline Price Levels vs. Crude Oil Price Levels"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After reading <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/motoring\/main.jhtml?xml=\/motoring\/2008\/09\/10\/mnfuel110.xml\">this piece in the Daily Telegraph<\/a> claiming prices at the pump were not falling as fast as the price of crude, I decided to see what was going on.  I went to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eia.doe.gov\/\">Energy Information Administration<\/a> website, from which I downloaded the <a href=\"http:\/\/tonto.eia.doe.gov\/dnav\/pet\/pet_pri_gnd_dcus_nus_w.htm\">weekly retail gas prices<\/a> and the <a href=\"http:\/\/tonto.eia.doe.gov\/dnav\/pet\/pet_pri_spt_s1_d.htm\">spot crude oil prices<\/a> and compared them to each other. They have records for the latter going back to the beginning of 1986, but for the former only to mid-1990 (with a mysterious gap of 6 weeks between at December 3, 1990 and January 21, 1991).  I then charted the price of gas (Weekly U.S. Regular Conventional Retail Gasoline) as a percentage of the price of oil (Weekly Cushing, OK WTI Spot Price FOB):<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/cgi\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/gas-oil.jpg\" onclick=\"window.open('http:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/cgi\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/gas-oil.jpg','popup','width=1382,height=524,scrollbars=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=yes,left=0,top=0');return false\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/cgi\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/gas-oil-tm.jpg\" height=\"175\" width=\"463\" border=\"1\" hspace=\"4\" vspace=\"4\" alt=\"Gas-Oil\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nWhile it is true that the over the last few weeks crude prices have dropped faster than gasoline, gas prices as a percentage of the cost of crude are near the lowest they have been for the dates for which data are available. And when you compare the relative prices:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/cgi\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/gas-oil2.jpg\" onclick=\"window.open('http:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/cgi\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/gas-oil2.jpg','popup','width=1310,height=622,scrollbars=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=yes,left=0,top=0');return false\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/cgi\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/gas-oil2-tm.jpg\" height=\"213\" width=\"448\" border=\"1\" hspace=\"4\" vspace=\"4\" alt=\"Gas-Oil2\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nYou can see that historically the prices have been pretty constant, but that crude ran up much more than gasoline, so the price at the pump was actually <strong>less<\/strong> than what it would have been had gas moved in lock-step with crude prices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After reading this piece in the Daily Telegraph claiming prices at the pump were not falling as fast as the price of crude, I decided<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":647,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pekNN-an","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/647"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}