The oil crisis has not only caused petrol prices to soar, it has revealed just how little competition there is among the big oil companies. A couple weeks ago the ACCC announced that it would be looking into uncompetitive behaviour by petrol companies in the rural areas.
The article shows how petrol price rises have been affected in different parts of Australia.
https://thepoint.com.au/news/260327-petrol-prices-are-soaring-in-sync-collusion-or-coincidence
I’m so fucking angry that the government won’t fucking call out Trump’s idiocy here.
Us “middle powers” need to be standing together and stating the obvious - Trump has fucked everyone by recklessly starting a forever war with no plan to mitigate the inevitable consequences.
Everyone is terrified of upsetting this man child lest he tariff us or some such. We’re all going to bear the stupid-tariff for the next decade now.
If Australia, and those ideologically aligned with us like UK, Canada, France, and Germany, agreed to tax services provided by the magnificent 7 (google, microsoft, nvidia, openai, meta, amazon) until Trump is no longer in office, he’d be gone in a month.
I’m so sick of everyone pretending like Grandpa is still ok to drive to the shops because no one wants to deal with the consequences of taking his license.
There’s not a lot of advantage to calling out Trump’s BS. Firstly because Australia has no real influence over American foreign policy (hell America has no real influence over American foreign policy), and secondly because the average voter generally doesn’t like Iran even if they don’t approve of the war.
You don’t seem to have been paying much attention to Trump’s mode of operation.
If a half dozen middle powers laid the blame for this shit show at his feet that would absolutely exert influence over American foreign policy.
the current US government is literally built around a bunch of fucking morons entertaining a lunatic. Trump blarts out some bullshit on behalf of his puppeteers, the flying monkeys scurry about to make it Reality. This expands out further to allies and other nations.
Thing is, Iran doesn’t want to play flying monkey. So Trump just keeps blarting his bullshit and wondering why Reality is not occurring any more. And the flying monkeys literally can no longer conceive of another way to function short of going yes sir no sir three bags full sir gargle gargle.
We’ve spent eighty years kissing american arse and now we don’t know what to do when it’s time for daddy to go into the hospice
Oh, there is definitely price collusion happening - just take one look at the way the Oil futures contracts are traded, and the massive bets being placed on sites like Kalshi and Polimarket.
But that’s impacting every nation, not just us - the leash is getting yanked much higher up the food chain than people like to point the finger here domestically at Shell/BP etc. & all thanks to the US and Israeli attacks on Iran damaging or destroying something like ~40% of all Middle East oil refining capacity.
Bit of a tangent, but I honestly think we need to step out from behind the US’s skirt at some point, they have proven to no longer be a reliable and trustworthy partner.
But what do we do beyond that, to ensure our national sovereignty - and prevent us getting Ukraine’d or Iran’d - short of developing and stockpiling our own nuclear arsenal?
Counter argument - the more we find out from this war, the more it’s clear that Iran absolutely 100% needs to be stopped. They have been developing long range weapons to target far away countries, and have been enriching uranium to make nuclear warheads. They are run by authoritarian terrorists and have been open and clear about their desire to destroy the western world.
Does the current situation suck? Yes. Is the USA annihilating their entire war arsenal and terrorist leaders worth it in the long run? Also yes. Former American presidents arearguably responsible for letting Iran get to where they are now. Thank god one of them has finally decided to do something about it. The world will be better off when this is over. It won’t be a “forever war” anymore than it already was before the US went in the other week. Iran is at war with the western world at all times.
What exactly have we “found out from this war” ?
Iran was stopped for all intents and purposes.
They have missiles capable of hitting targets significantly further away than previously thought, for one.
All this war is proving is that Iran was incredibly restrained for the last half a century and that they would have been smarter to actually develop nuclear weapons because then the USA and Israel might be forced to just leave them the fuck alone.
They have been trying to develop nuclear weapons. It’s not easy.
The rest of the world doesn’t want to just leave a terrorist “death to our enemies” country alone. They need to be stopped and kept in check.
We are the terrorists, not them.
We definitely aren’t.
Mate, youre a fucken idiot. Everything you just siad was utter bullshit.
It’s almost like they are all buying the same oil
What happened before mid March?
Do you mean they usually buy different oil?
wat
Well old mate said they are buying the same oil. But there are clearly different patterns in the graph… which infers is they are buying the same oil now, then they must have been buying different oil before when there was clear variation in prices.
Why does Perth have price hikes every week ?
Wait, the rest of the country doesn’t have a fuel cycle?? Huh.
Pro: you can reliably get “cheap” fuel on a Tuesday.
Con: Everyone gets fuel on Tuesdays, and you will sit in traffic to fuel up. And if you run out of fuel on a Wednesday or Thursday, you’re gonna be (even more) broke.
This was the case in Melbourne too, when I was working at a service station back in my Uni days.
Not sure when things changed, but apparently it moved to a fortnightly cycle at some point, before completely losing any semblance of predictability post-COVID.
I’m pretty sure Shell and Ampol are the main culprits. Other stations don’t seem shift as dramatically.
Wait, the rest of the country doesn’t have a fuel cycle?? Huh.
Other cities do, they just don’t show on this graph. You can normally track them on the ACCC’s website. Perth having a cycle isn’t unusual, but it is unusually short and extremely consistent compared to those of other cities.
ABC News Daily hosted David Byrne, professor of economics, who talked about this.
He didn’t go into a lot of detail but basically, it’s because fuel watch allows retailers to monitor each other’s prices.
Basically, fuel retailers can always increase their margins by fluctuating their prices. Cheap today more expensive tomorrow.
When Fuel Watch was introduced (only exists in WA), you couldn’t just fluctuate your prices irrespective of what everyone else was doing because if your price was significantly higher than everyone elses you wouldn’t have any customers. So retailers had to fluctuate their prices in concert with other retailers.
Finally, if every retailer is going to have a high point and a low point each week, it feels sensible that right before the weekend would be the highpoint, because that’s when everyone is gearing up for their weekend plans. Then high over the weekend when people are doing things, high on Monday when everyone is back from a weekend away, then cheap fuel Tuesday to gather up some customers, and so on.
I swear that began when fuel watch was implemented.
None the less I like the fuel watch system. Before that it was a clown show.
Occam’s razor: Global oil prices and resource scarcity are not a collusion.
Edgeworth price cycles go brrr
Edgeworth price cycle - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgeworth_price_cycle
