Mark Bauer

⛽ HERE'S THE PART NOBODY EXPLAINS TO YOU ABOUT GAS PRICES! Trump is right: Oil companies are playing both ends against the middle! A gas station owner does not set his own fuel cost. He buys his gasoline wholesale from a refiner or distributor, often locked into a supply contract with a major oil company brand. That wholesale price is set upstream. By the refiners. By the majors. Not by the guy running the register. So why is wholesale still high when crude is sitting at $68 a barrel. The industry's answer is inventory lag. Refiners are still selling fuel made from oil they bought weeks ago at higher prices. Chevron's own CFO has said publicly that lower crude prices take time to work through the supply chain before drivers see real savings. Fine. But here is the question that breaks that excuse wide open. If stations are selling old inventory bought at yesterday's price, why does the pump price jump the second crude spikes, before that expensive new oil has even been delivered. You cannot have it both ways. Slow to fall because of old cheap inventory, but instant to rise before the new expensive inventory even arrives. The real answer is something called replacement cost pricing. Retailers price gas based on what it will cost to refill the tank tomorrow, not what they paid for the gas sitting in the ground today. That is why prices jump like lightning when crude rises. But somehow that same forward looking logic disappears the moment crude falls. Suddenly everybody remembers the inventory they are still working through. That is not a supply chain mystery. That is a choice. Economists call the pattern rockets and feathers. Prices shoot up like rockets the second crude spikes. They drift down like feathers when crude falls. The same companies pricing forward on the way up are mysteriously pricing backward on the way down. Trump named the companies directly. ExxonMobil. Chevron. Shell. BP. He said it plainly in the Oval Office, that they are the ones not passing along the savings they should already be passing along. California gets singled out too. Gas there averages over five dollars a gallon, with state taxes piling on top of everything else. This is not Trump bullying small business. This is Trump asking the companies holding the lever why the logic only runs in one direction. Lower oil should mean lower gas, with the same speed it took to raise it.