Average Price of Gasoline in U.S. Surpasses $5 a Gallon for First Time Ever: GasBuddy
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The average price of a gallon of regular gas in the U.S. surpassed $5 a gallon for the first time in history, adding to inflationary pressure in the country.
GasBuddy, the gas price site that tracks gas prices at over 150,000 U.S. gas stations, said in a statement that gasoline inventories in the U.S. have fallen over 25 million barrels, “or over one billion gallons, since the start of March amidst a global decline in refining capacity due to the Covid-19 pandemic and accelerated demand going into the summer.”
March 5: National average price of gas breaks $4/gal for the first time since 2008
March 7: National average price of gas breaks previous record; $4.10/gal
March 10: Average price of gasoline peaks at $4.35/gal
April 29: Average diesel prices reach new all-time high; $5.16/gal
May 5: March record broken; prices rise above $4.35/gal 1
Patrick De Haan, GasBuddy's head of petroleum analysis, said he believes gas prices will continue to increase as the summer goes on. "And if we see a refinery outage, a refinery snag or a major hurricane that shuts things down, it could get even uglier," he told WJLA.
AAA announced Thursday that the price of regular gasoline averaged about $4.97, which is up 26 cents from last week. The average gas price is about $2 higher than the same time last year.
The Wall Street Journal reported that drivers are trying to navigate the trend by purchasing fewer gallons per visit.
“They want to fill up a certain amount in dollars and it just doesn’t go as far,” said Andrew Clyde, CEO of Arkansas-based fuel retailer Murphy USA. Lucas Davis, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, told the paper that higher prices mean lower consumption. He said a 10 percent rise in gasoline prices usually results in a 2 percent to 3 percent decline in gasoline consumption
The Labor Department has pointed out that an increase in gasoline prices contributed to 18 percent of April’s overall inflation rate of 8.3 percent. The Labor Department also announced that initial jobless claims jumped by 27,000 to 229,000 last week.
TREND FORECAST: Oil prices will remain high during the summer season as more people drive and fly to their tourist destinations. Consumers’ growing reluctance to spend will combine with the impending global economic slowdown, will push prices down, but not greatly: the winter heating season will raise gas and oil demand again, keeping prices elevated through this year.
OIL PRICES
Brent crude was down 0.53 percent to $123.90 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate was also down 0.93 percent to $121.21 per barrel. Goldman Sachs is now forecasting Brent crude oil prices will average $140 a barrel during the summer months, up from its prior call of $125 a barrel.
TREND FORECAST: The picture is clear. The higher oil prices rise, the faster inflation will rise and the greater the pressure on central banks to raise interest rates. And the higher interest rates rise, the deeper equity markets and economies will fall.
Note to Readers: World renowned trends forecaster Gerald Celente, the publisher of The Trends Journal has been warning his subscribers that the U.S. economy is not threatened by stagflation, but rather ‘dragflation,’ and they should be prepared.
Celente pointed out that the same Federal Reserve officials and business media reporters who got inflation wrong a year ago, saying it was “temporary” and “transitory,” are wrong again.
A recent survey from Bank of America Global Research found that about 77 percent of investment fund managers now say they see "below-trend growth and above-trend inflation," which means stagflation.
“It’s dragflation. The economies won't be stagnant, they will drag down as inflation rises,” Celente said. “We’ve been writing about it for a year. Are they too ill-informed to see the facts, or are they lying to hide the truth of how bad it will be?”
Celente said people better prepare.
“From big businesses to the average person, they better start preparing for dragflation."