Well, Shell and Exon seem to be making record profits year after year…each year better than the last…
You’re kidding! I never noticed that. So I should get all of mine well before Halloween, huh?
Oil is fungible.
That is, oil is oil, and where it comes from has little influence on the price - it’s a world market. If we won’t pay world prices for their oil, they’ll sell it elsewhere. Conversely, if they try to charge more than we can get it from elsewhere, we won’t buy from them.
Some states (like California) have pretty well guaranteed they’ll pay more by mandating special formulas (and gas stations in California can only buy California-formula gas), but crude oil gets sold to the highest bidder.
I don’t like paying more for gas at all, but most folks in the US don’t realize how lucky we are - most places I’ve travelled they’re paying over twice as much as we are, even now.
Perhaps the increase in the price of groceries in the US is your government’s substitute for healthcare, seeing as most of the population tends to be ( grossly ) overweight.
The origin of oil has quite an influence on the price. Saudi and Russian oil (which might have held the price down if the production were increased ) are both high in sulphur. Sweet oil costs about $ 7 a barrel more than these.
One reason for your government’s impatience with Iraq was the intention to sell oil in euros, rather than dollars. That made it important to get Hussein out before the change was made.
Ayup, you may be right, Andrew.
I’m sure that unhealthy food and high prices are not a problem where you live.
These things are all relative, DCrom.
I eat once a day, or I might become as fat as the average American.
Inhabitants of the UK are tending to overeat.Small town shops are much cheaper than the supermarkets for wholesome food, I find.
Before the problem can be dealt with it is necessary to identify the cause.
I believe it is because two generations of children have grown up watching an overweight population around them eating nonstop. They have grown up thinking that such eating and the fat people they see around them as a consequence are normal.
They just join in naturally, and you can see the result.
And before the WMD inspector’s report was released.
Here’s another example for you. I shop for groceries fortnightly, and have for years. I buy pretty much the same things every two weeks. I’m mostly a whole-foods cook, so very little of what I buy is packaged. My usual grocery bill for a two-week period is right around $100. Sometimes it might be as high as $110 (if I have to buy a lot of cleaning products, say), and sometimes it’s as low as $90, but $100 is the average. For the past month, however, my grocery bill has been around $160. I haven’t bought anything different, but my grocery bill is suddenly half again as high…that’s a pretty sharp rise in a pretty short period.
Redwolf