In giddy praise of $1.97 a gallon gasoline

GASOLINE for $1.97 a gallon. On the Jersey side of the outbound Holland Tunnel last week. At a number of gas stations. It’s the beginning of a price war! And it’s happening during the peak driving season, when gasoline prices are supposed to be rising. This is the time of year that the gas distributors and service station owners live for, but this year — for the second straight year — it’s killing them.

There are still some price-gougers around who apparently don’t care if they sell any fuel. But most gas stations — including some national chains — have thrown in the towel and are selling gasoline at what many today would consider an attractive price.

AAA keeps track, and it says that regular gasoline is selling for an average of $2.28 a gallon throughout the US. That’s down from $2.30 a gallon a week ago and $2.36 a gallon in May.

Last year at this time, gas fell to $2.31 a gallon.

Back in April, I wrote in this column that gasoline prices were rising because Wall Street speculators were trying to hype the peak driving season. The price of gas back then was averaging $2.44 a gallon nationally — 16 cents a gallon higher than it is now.

But oil and gasoline inventories were rising and still are. The supply was way ahead of the demand because of the listless US economy. All of that, I wrote back then, would cause gasoline prices to drop.

“Don’t believe [the speculators],” I wrote on April 20. “They were wrong [about gas prices going up] last year, and they will be wrong again.

“Without strong economic growth or massive job creation, people are going to pinch their pennies and keep their road trips shorter. And that’s going to put a lid on energy prices.”

Again, that was from the April 20 column. And it’s still true today.

Nobody wants to see a weak economy. But if there is one benefit to the worldwide downturn, it’s the declining price of commodities like oil. And since oil-producing nations are desperate for revenue and the Trump administration is determined to increase US oil output, it’s unlikely that anyone will reduce energy production.

You’ve probably already heard that oil prices have collapsed, with a barrel of crude dropping to the almost-unheard-of price of just $42 last week.

Crude oil and gasoline inventories around the globe are bloated. And while you might not like fracking in your backyard, this relatively new way of retrieving oil from the earth has changed the balance of power in the oil world in the US’s favor.

Where’s the most expensive gas in the continental US? As always, on the West Coast to as far east as Iowa. South Carolina has the cheapest gas, averaging slightly under $2 a gallon.

But let me get back to that $1.97 gas just outside the Holland Tunnel.

Remember, a few months back, New Jersey hiked its gasoline tax by 23 cents a gallon. If that increase hadn’t happened, Jersey would be the clear winner in the price wars with gas going for around $1.75 a gallon.

Everyone, please join me in saying, “Aw, the poor oil and gas companies!” Maybe next year they’ll have a peak driving season in time for the Fourth of July.

When will gasoline prices rise? When the economy gets healthier and people spend more.

When will that happen? No time soon, according to one new report.

Citigroup’s Economic Surprise Index, which measures the economy against expectations, is at its lowest (when it’s low, reality hasn’t matched economists’ optimism) — since August 2011 That’s when there was concern about another recession and European countries were getting more attention for their debt problems than their cuisine.

This is the last week off the second quarter of 2017. The first three months were an absolute dud. The economy probably did a tad better since late March.

In other big news, a company called Gfycat says movie trailers are too long.

And it predicts that trailers will soon be interactive, which I hope won’t happen while people are in the movie theaters or we will soon be hearing a plea from the screen to “please turn on your cell phones.”

Personally I like the length of trailers. They give me enough time to finish the newspaper I inevitably bring to the cinema. Talk about macho men. A group called ReportLinker conducted a study of cyberbullying that found 45 percent of young women were very concerned about being attacked on social media while 38 percent of young men say they are not concerned at all. (Maybe that’s because they are the ones doing the bullying.) In case you want to be cyberbullied or want to do it to others, you should know that 24 percent said it occurred most in text messages, 23 percent on Facebook, 21 percent on Instagram, 21 percent on Twitter and 10 percent on Snapchat. Thirty-eight percent of people have already been the victim of cyberbullying. It’s a nearly even split between racist and sexist comments (at 35 percent and 34 percent, respectively) with revenge porn coming in at 23 percent.