Wall St. says gas should be 20c a gal. higher at the pump, but they're holding off due to political pressure-Crudele

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(Ed. note: The white strip/defacement 3 lines below was done by a criminal hacker.)

3/13/12, "Wall St. fears good jobs news means no Fed $$," NY Post, Crudele

"Drivers, consider yourselves lucky — for now.

I explained late last month how Wall Street speculators were driving the price of gasoline higher. And how — unless someone stopped it — there would be a large, automatic increase in the price of gas once the March gasoline futures contract expired on Wall Street and traders started playing with the April contract.

Well, there was a big increase in the price of gasoline futures on Wall Street. But so far only a fraction of that jump has shown up at the pump.

Are gasoline refiners feeling sorry for us? Or are they afraid of the consequences?

The price of gasoline in the April futures contracts rose as much as 37 cents a gallon during the first week of March. Ten cents of that was caused by erroneous reports about an explosion of a Saudi Arabian pipeline.

The other 27 cents represented the difference in the price of gasoline as represented by the April futures contract compared with the March contract.

But gas at the pump is only 7 cents a gallon higher now than it was at the end of February.

Part of refiners’ reluctance to raise prices could be due to political pressure. One commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission last week was on the talk show circuit ranting against Wall Street energy speculators.

The pressure has been so great that Wall Street traders haven’t dared to jack up the value of the next futures contract in line — the May contract, which was trading yesterday at about the same level as the April contract."

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