Lydia De Pillis has an article in the NYT on how gasoline prices don’t move one-for-one with oil prices:
Fuel station owners take some of the hit for consumers when oil prices surge. On the way down, they try to get their money back.
The article notes some money illusion ($4/gallon is a barrier), satisficing behavior on gasoline price downswings, and gasoline sales as a smaller share of total gas station/convenience store revenue than in the past. She provides this graphic relating spot RBOB (wholesale) price and retail gasoline.
Source: DePillis/NYT.
Note wholesale and retail prices have diverged in recent days.
Looking at a longer horizon, I use Brent oil futures to project out retail gasoline prices, and compare to RBOB futures.
Figure 1: Price of Brent oil (blue, left log scale), NYMEX futures for Brent as of 4/20 (light blue, left log scale), both in $/bbl; price of regular gasoline (dark red, right log scale), NYMEX RBOB NY Harbor futures (light red, right log scale), forecast based on Brent oil futures (red, right log scale, all $/gallon.
I used a log first differences specification between gasoline and Brent oil prices to make the forecast (see post). Note that the spot wholesale-retail price difference was about $1 pre-War; the average gap between forecast and futures is about a dollar in the sample shown above.
why do you yanks call petrol gasoline
Not Trampis: Not sure. We should all be calling it Benzin…
We cal gasoline “gasoline” because that’s the earlier name, from 1864. You’ve called gasollne “petrol” since 1895 because the French call it that. It’s yet another instance of British peasants (and their Commonwealth descendants) trying to sound like their Norman betters, who try endlessly to differentiate themselved from peasants.
I’m surprised Bruce Hall has not chimed in saying he bought gasoline for $2 a gallon when in truth he paid $2 per liter.