Continued good news for consumers on gas prices

Continued good news for consumers on gas prices

There’ll be lots of economic news starting tomorrow, but for today let’s pause and take a look at the energy situation.

Here’s a look at oil prices in the past year up through yesterday from CNBC:

And here’s a look over the same time period from Gas Buddy:

Here’s a close-up of gas prices for the past month:

Gas prices follow oil prices with typically a delay of several weeks. Oil prices peaked in early June, and gas prices at mid-month. Oil prices appear to have started stabilizing at the beginning of August, and gas price declines slowed down a couple of weeks later.

Finally, here’s the comparison of oil prices and gas prices (through last Wednesday, averaged weekly. Since there are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil, I’ve divided oil prices by 42 to show the mark-up at retail:

With oil apparently stabilizing in the $90/barrel range, I expect gas prices to stabilize about where they are now, in the vicinity of $3.70-$3.90/gallon nationwide. This is only a short term forecast as to gas, and a nowcast as to oil; I am not forecasting where oil prices will go from here.

But this is still very good news for consumers compared with the last 6 months.