11–20 of 39 posts
I'm not saying this is The Big One (I've been expecting it for a decade now) but I do expect The Big One to start a lot like this.
whats also interesting is that the price of gas hasn't moved much either: http://www.gasbuddy.com/gb_retail_price_chart.aspx?time=24 i guess this is a case where lower demand has kept prices high.
With recently depressed crude prices, some countries are actually pulling back production.
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...
There's not much context, but I'm struck by the fact that this appears to have been a (very modest) leading indicator before the Great Recession.
Its that 2011 September October decrease thats particularly interesting. I'm trying to think of what happened that would have caused a 25%ish drop in sales.
Average vehicle fuel economy hit its all-time high [1], and there's been a massive cut-back in how much people drive [2]. Americans are driving less and when they do drive, they're driving cars that use less fuel per mile. You can likely credit the fuel economy increase on the federal mandates for higher MPG ratings on new cars, and the cut-back in driving on the high unemployment and stagnant/falling real wages of t…
here is a google search i used: https://www.google.com/search?q=gas+refinery+shuts+down&...
edit: speeling.
There's not much context, but I'm struck by the fact that this appears to have been a (very modest) leading indicator before the Great Recession.
I'm not sure it was a useful one. There is a similar dip in the early 90s that doesn't seem to correspond to much.
Most sales are wholesale - http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&...
Going to take a wild guess and say that a refinery sold some gas stations or somehow a bunch of sales got reclassified from retail to wholesale.
See definitions http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/TblDefs/pet_cons_refmg_tbldef2.a...
If you think about it 25m gallons per day is not the right number for the USA, it's like 0.1 gallons per person order of magnitude, 10x that seems more reasonable, you also have to count all the public transportation, trucks etc.
If you hie over to FRED and look at retail sales from gasoline stations (which also includes candy bars, lottery tickets, etc. and is in dollars, not gallons), you will also see there was no recent massive drop -
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CES4244700001
edit: Ack! that's employment at gas stations. Here is retail sales at gas stations -
http://www.economagic.com/em-cgi/data.exe/cenret/nrt447sa
the human mind is truly a rationalizing machine - when you look hard enough for a reason you will always find it, even when the data is bad.
Pretty simple: the U.S. economy is contracting severely, even though the manipulated (and preposterous, if you think about them for more than a moment) economic statistics (GDP, U3) are not. I'm not saying this is The Big One (I've been expecting it for a decade now) but I do expect The Big One to start a lot like this.
Average vehicle fuel economy hit its all-time high [1], and there's been a massive cut-back in how much people drive [2]. Americans are driving less and when they do drive, they're driving cars that use less fuel per mile. You can likely credit the fuel economy increase on the federal mandates for higher MPG ratings on new cars, and the cut-back in driving on the high unemployment and stagnant/falling real wages of t…
2011_ 6,089,422___ 6,951,210___ 13,040,632
2010_ 5,635,433___ 6,136,787__ 11,772,220
2009_ 5,400,890___ 5,200,478___ 10,601,368
Here are some data. Lots of trucks.
Fleet Fuel economy != improving ?
edit:
Newer trucks are not much better on Gas, still ~20Mpg/ish
Maybe old trucks were horrible? Dunno
If not replacements, blending in more trucks is not helping MPGs
Average vehicle fuel economy hit its all-time high [1], and there's been a massive cut-back in how much people drive [2]. Americans are driving less and when they do drive, they're driving cars that use less fuel per mile. You can likely credit the fuel economy increase on the federal mandates for higher MPG ratings on new cars, and the cut-back in driving on the high unemployment and stagnant/falling real wages of t…
That would explain the steady decline, but doesn't explain what I think is the real question, the drastic drop starting in October 2011.
