why is gas going up?

Question

and then the gas goes down

Answer 1

The simplest answer to this is: Speculation.

Oil is traded on the commodities market just like gold. If traders suspect that oil is udnervalued, they will buy oil contracts, pushing the prices higher. If traders feel that prices will fall, they will sell oil contracts. This works just like the stock market. If people think a stock will go up, people buy the stock, thus pushing the price up.

The reason people cite China and India and Supply and Demand is that these reasons are some of the considerations that the traders calculate when deciding to buy or sell oil. Because of China's growing demand for oil, traders believe that oil prices will go higher. Therefore, they buy up the oil contracts, thus pushing up gas prices.

One huge misconception is that the oil companies control the price. They are relatively helpless in this case. When the commodities markets priced oil low back in the 90's, Big Oil was struggling to survive. Now that prices are high, they are rolling in the dough. Ultimately, Big Oil is a seller who has no pricing control over their product. Price is set by the speculators in the commodities markets, and Big Oil lives or dies by those prices.

Oil, like gold, pork bellies, corn, soybeans and the stock market, moves up and down depending on news, analysis, and speculation.

Hope this is helpful!

Answer 2

A big part of the reason is the rise of capatilism in China and the booming economy there. China is a huge country--- about 1.3 billion people--- and in the last decade or two, the society has opened up to capitalism, where private people and companies own the goods and means of producing them, as opposed to communism or socialism where the resources are mostly owned by the State. As more people end up with more money in their hands, they buy more things--- and in China, they're buying lots of scooters, motorcycles and cars. We've got a lot more people competing for the world's oil than we used to.

As far as the recent dip in gas prices, that's pretty common in the first few weeks after Memorial Day. Memorial Day weekend is one of the big travel weekends of summer and prices go up because demand goes up. When the crunch is over, prices stabilize and go down a little. They'll go back up sharply over Labor Day weekend for sure, and usually for the 4th of July too.

Answer 3

greedy people who need to be on a billion dollar list vs a million dollar list

Answer 4

supply and demand

Answer 5

because

Answer 6

because it can