Industry committee  Certainly oil companies do risk management in terms of buying futures for crude oil and buying or selling futures for gasoline. Those are referred to as wet barrels. In other words, institutional buyers such as municipalities will actually buy in these markets in order to normali

Industry committee  I think a lot of the concerns stem from the fact that consumers have seen close to record high pump prices. But crude prices were not at the records we saw in 2008. What happened in 2008 was that while crude prices were high, there was already a marked decrease in demand for gaso

Industry committee  That's one of those debatable areas. Does speculation really cause crude prices to rise higher than they should? You can put the shoe on the other foot. Speculation caused crude prices to fall precipitously in 2008, when the world economy started tanking, and those very same spec

Industry committee  I think your question illustrates something I spoke of, and that is the comparison that so often is made is the comparison to crude oil prices, not to wholesale rack prices. If you actually looked at pump price changes in relation to changes at wholesale gasoline, as opposed to c

Industry committee  As it happens, we are in the midst of doing the study of that very subject, and although I don't have formal data to present, our preliminary findings are that in the course of looking at the past five years' worth of long weekends, looking at the price before and the price after

Industry committee  If I had a coin I could flip it and we could decide who is the winner, but my postulation is that I would be the winner half the time and you would be perhaps the other half of the time.

Industry committee  That would be a useful metric; however, there is a vast wealth of data that is accessible in the States that really paint, by and large, the picture of inventory ebbs and flows for North America, although it doesn't include Canadian data. That would be an enhancement to what alre

Industry committee  I would suggest that a large number of dealers don't know what FIFO means. When a dealer decides what price to set for gasoline today, that dealer looks at two things. One is what it cost to buy the load of fuel that he has in his tanks today, now. The other is, looking down the

Industry committee  A change in the GST, if it were going up, would generally be passed along to the consumer the very next day. If a decrease in taxes were not passed along to the consumer, through our analysis, we would have seen a sustained increase in the rack-to-retail margin. We don't see that

Industry committee  Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks for your invitation for me to appear today before this committee on the subject of petroleum prices. The committee's invitation was based on our firm's reputation as an impartial expert in the field of petroleum refining and marketing. This