First we have a plot of gas and oil prices. I got the data here and here. The weekly data for both didn't start until January 1997 so that's where I started the graph.
The dates for the gas and oil data do not line up perfectly, they are offset by 3 days. Nonetheless I took the gas price per gallon for that week and divided it by the oil price per gallon for that week to get a ratio. You will notice that the ratio has actually been lower in the last couple years than the average over the last decade.
And lastly if we plot the gasoline price with its ratio to oil, you can see that while gasoline prices have gone up, the ratio to oil prices has NOT.
You can draw your own conclusions, but based on this data, I conclude that companies are NOT profiting more by selling gasoline in the US today at $4/gal pump prices than they were 6 years ago at $1.50/gal.
Yes, I know that this data does not account for lots of things (tax changes over time, regional price and formulation differences, strength of the dollar, et cetera). It is a simple look at the retail price of a product and the wholesale cost of its primary raw material.
I will send you the Excel file in which I made these graphs if you want to work on it yourself.
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1 comments:
decent post. Told ya I'd read it and comment. :P
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