The Real Reason Your Gas Prices Are Rising

Where is the congress and the president??? 

Well, boys and girls here we go again with the gasoline prices. As we get closer to the summer driving season the prices of gas goes up and one might say what the hell can we do, it's the law of supply and demand.  

Let's take a look first and the supply of crude oil has risen to its highest level in nearly 20 years, and refiners are operating at less than 85 percent of capacity, which leaves them plenty of room to churn out more gasoline if the need arises but the demand for gasoline is down significantly to a 10 year low.  

Now let me see what I learned in college economics 101: demand low, supply high prices fall – right?  Not exactly, the price of gas is actually rising and has been rising by nearly 30 percent in the past two months alone. 

So let's tar and feather those nasty oil company executives for taking advantage of us poor working stiffs.  But wait, it's not the oil companies pulling a fast one, it's the Wall Street speculators, some of the recipients of billions of dollars in taxpayers' bailout money. The guys we just bailed out such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and many other Wall Street traders who are once again able to place unregulated, speculative bets on the future price of oil.  

This is the so-called grey or dark market of derivatives and swaps that led to the sub-prime mortgage crash, which then crashed Wall Street and ruined the economy.  These are the same guys we are bailing out with trillions of our hard earned tax dollars. 

Speculators like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley who are able to sidestep the regulations that limit investments in commodities such as oil have been buying trillions of dollars worth of oil Futures by pooling money from hedge funds and other large investors and they're betting that the economy eventually will rebound, that the Obama administration's spending policies and Federal Reserve actions will trigger inflation and that oil prices will rise.   

This turns oil futures contracts into a way for investors to hedge against inflation at the expense of the American consumer and distorts the usual process by which buyers and sellers set prices. This is the real reason that the price of gas skyrockets higher and higher.   

Big institutional investors are sucking the air out of the fragile economic recovery, in part because the big Wall Street banks are exempt from these restrictions, and there also no such limits in derivatives markets.  These vast unregulated markets, also called over-the-counter markets, involve private contracts between swaps dealers who are usually big Wall Street banks, and are thought to be 10 times larger than the futures market.  These markets have no position limits and no regulation, thanks to the commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 passed under the Clinton administration.  

Since our government won't let a real free market exist, we better regulate the hell out of these loophole-savvy Wall Street thugs. Every dollar they invest into these dark market trades is a dollar they are not investing in our real economy.  

Peace, Liberty, and Prosperity through intelligence, strength, and integrity.