New York, NY – Wall Street is being blamed for the rise in gas prices.
Drivers in the US are looking for someone to blame for high gasoline prices. Wall Street is the popular scapegoat for raising the cost on hundreds of millions of barrels of oil.
In Midtown New York last week, several people blamed Wall Street traders as they paid more than $4 per gallon to fill up their gas tanks.
According to the Huffington Post , John Keegan, an exterminator with Terminate Control was filling up his van when he remarked:
“It really is not supply and demand. It’s definitely speculation.”
A cab driver was convinced the gas price would drop by more than half if the government “stopped Wall Street trading oil.”
This is very similar to the anger triggered in 2008 when gasoline prices were extremely high due to a massive oil spike that a regular sedan in Arizona costed around $50 to fill the tank. There was a lot of speculative interest from investors at that time as well.
Some pinned the rise in oil and gas price on the President getting an easy paycheck before losing office, due to the timing.
There is still no consensus among traders and regulators over how much impact speculators have on the market five years later. No one knows what, if anything, should be done to limit their participation in the trading of oil.
Stories about booming US oil and gas production aided in lower price expectations among consumers. Had it been localized solely in the US, that might be a reasonable assumption. Oil trading remains a global market and the United States still relies on nearly 10 million barrels of crude imports daily.
What do you think? Is Wall Street to blame for the rise in gas prices?
How Wall Street Is Raising the Price of Gas abcn.ws/X5kXWk (via @ abc ) As true in 2013 as it was in 2012
— JoAnn C (@jasmine1972) February 12, 2013