As if you needed any more proof that gas prices are fixed…
There was a fire at an oil refinery in Richmond, California that shut down production.
Gas prices went up here.
Not one drop of gasoline coming out of that California refinery was ever sent up here. There is no pipeline connecting California and Washington. None of the oil refined at Cherry Point here in Washington ever went down there. The markets are separate and distinct: oil is global, but gasoline is local–at least very short-term. And our gas prices went up instantly after the fire. A refinery buys hundreds of thousands of barrels at a time and it pays to move the crude, unrefined oil to the highest price you can get. You and I buy gas a dozen gallons at a time; there is no profit in moving it hundreds of miles. Over time, weeks and months, the price of oil is directly tied to the price we pay at the pump for gasoline. But the gas we bought days after the Richmond, California fire was already in the pipeline, could not be transported to California to make up for their loss of refinery capacity and the price was jacked–illegally.
Speaking of ‘price’….
The New York banking regulators went after a bank for helping Iran launder some $250 billion over the past ten years. They fined them over $300 million.
Do you have any idea what Iran ‘paid’ to have $250 billion laundered? Twenty per cent? Maybe as much as a third? It is an illegal activity; these kind of things cost a lot of money. If the bank just simply ‘took’ a billion or two, here and there, what could Iran do about it? Go to the police? Write a letter to the editor? They would have to just swallow hard and continue. They needed the money and it had to be laundered by someone.
The fine levied against the bank was like a slap on the wrist, exept that a slap on the wrist leaves a mark.
Randy Travis, country/western singer and songwriter was caught drivign naked and DUI. His explaination? “Research.”