Money

[Mauslag PIngman]

Back in the seventies prices went up and it was blamed on oil. Everything has to be shipped. Oil prices had skyrocketed. Shipping uses oil and gasoline so everything that had to be shipped went up in price. Well, lately oil prices went down. Gas prices went down and its been about a year but I don't see the price of anything going down or even leveling off. Seems like prices never level up but there's always the capacity to go up.

If you remember, gasoline prices went way up after the Katrina hurricane. Shortly afterwards the price of everything went up quite a bit and then there was a financial disaster and housing crisis. So was all this caused by gasoline?

[zytukin]

No, it was caused by capitalism.
CEOs just wanting any excuse to get more money.

Katrina had nothing to do with the prices, at least, not directly. If I recall correctly, all the gas companies coincidentally made record profits during that time as well. The companies simply used it as an excuse to raise prices to rake in the money. Conversely, the major corporations wont easily be swayed to reduce their profits for no reason, so prices wont go back down for most things.

The collapse was due to all the major corporations going overboard with the milking and people running out of disposable income so they stopped buying things.

[SilverWarior]

You say that prices for oil and gasoline went down. While they did went down in US they didn't go down in many other countries.
For instance if I just look at fuel prices in Slovenia (my country) fro the time we gained independence back in 2004 till today fuel prices doubled.
And there are many countries around the world which are in similar position.

Now does this have to do with prices in US? Well since US is not capable of producing all of the goods that you can buy in your stores it means that some of these goods are being imported. Many times from countries where fuel prices are still much higher than in US. Same goes for some raw resources that US needs to be importing from abroad.

So you see while fuel and oil do play an important part in product prices you need not only be taking local fuel price into account but the fuel price from the country from where products or their raw resources are originating from.

[joseailton]

Back in the seventies prices went up and it was blamed on oil. Everything has to be shipped. Oil prices had skyrocketed. Shipping uses oil and gasoline so everything that had to be shipped went up in price. Well, lately oil prices went down. Gas prices went down and its been about a year but I don't see the price of anything going down or even leveling off. Seems like prices never level up but there's always the capacity to go up.

If you remember, gasoline prices went way up after the Katrina hurricane. Shortly afterwards the price of everything went up quite a bit and then there was a financial disaster and housing crisis. So was all this caused by gasoline?

According to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion), in combustion, gasoline is known as fuel, and oxygen is the oxidant. In this situation you described, I would say that gasoline itself was the oxidant, and the fuel is capitalism.

I'm out of breath after such a confuse statement, I think I need some oxygen.

[GoldenPorkchop80]

I would say that gasoline itself was the oxidant, and the fuel is capitalism.

You're right,
After Katrina, gasoline companies started price gouging (which is illegal, at least in disaster scenarios), causing massive prices so that they could turn a huge profit without having to lose a lot of inventory. They literally saw the Katrina disaster as a big cash register.