Hurricane Stuff - Part 3

WHEN YOU'RE RIGHT, YOU'RE RIGHT

When I said that I had to go out Monday night to get gas before prices shot up to $2.75, apparently I was wrong. They were at or above $3.00 as I drove around today. And there were freaking lines at the gas stations for the $2.90 gas in Columbia. Boy, did these jokers screw the pooch, but they probably didn't comprehend the fact that gas prices were going to skyrocket until they drove into work and found out that gas prices were about 60 cents higher this afternoon than this past weekend.

It's nice to be an economist and smart. Now, the real question is whether ethanol has gone up that much. I'm going to guess that the price will be around $2.20 or so, mostly because people will be willing to damage their engines to buy lower priced gas, even though their SUVs aren't designed for Ethanol. Haha.

In macro-economics / finance, there's something called cost-push inflation. Basically, what happens is that for some reason, prices rise. Then because people see prices increase, they purchase more before prices increase even more. Then prices increase more because of increased demand. And so on and so forth. So we'll have to see when the cycle ends here... Prices are going up all over the country (according to http://www.southcarolinagasprices.com)
So there's definitely some shenanigans afoot.

The real question is how much is actual supply shock, how much is demand increases due to hording, and how much is gouging. And without knowing what gas stations pay, I'm going to say that there's a good amount of gouging happening. But people are still willing to pay for it.

Still, I'd like to see what Ethanol is going for and see if it's finally economical to go to ethanol with the much, much lower gas mileage. The ethanol board is full of crap when they say that there could be increased gas mileage. But we'll see how that goes this weekend with Labor Day travel. Holy shenikies, gas prices are going to skyrocket. And it's happening close enough that people aren't going to put off whatever plans they had this weekend, including us. But we'll see how crazy prices get.