Harvey-high gas prices should flame out pronto

FAIR is fair. It’s time for a big drop in gasoline prices. The cost of fuel soared nearly overnight in the past two weeks because Hurricane Harvey hit Texas hard and caused the closing of some gasoline refineries. Now that Harvey is gone — and the upcoming Hurricane Irma, as threatening as it is, isn’t likely to reduce gasoline production — it would be fair for prices to come down overnight. But don’t count on it. Gas prices have always been quick to rise and “sticky,” as the experts euphemistically say, when it’s time for them to fall. And that is likely to happen this time as well, especially if our elected officials allow producers and gasoline stations to continue their hurricane-related price gouging.

According to the American Automobile Association, or AAA, the most recent average retail price for gasoline in the US was nearly $2.65 a gallon. That was 27 cents a gallon more — 10 percent higher — than just one week earlier.

It isn’t as though Hurricane Harvey actually made a dent in the ample amount of gasoline available in this country. So, the supply-demand model isn’t at work here.

There’s still 23.7 weeks’ worth of gasoline in storage in the US. The same as the week before, and the week before that.

And crude oil, which is refined into gasoline, was piling up in storage tanks and on ships while Harvey was doing its dirty work. So gasoline refiners will have too much crude to work with now that they are back in action.

Speculators who wanted gasoline prices to rise so they can profit from trades also got lucky because Harvey hit right before the Labor Day weekend, which was the final hope for a rise during “peak driving season.”

But now that the peak, which starts on Memorial Day weekend, is officially over, the price of gasoline should drop on that fact alone.

Gas prices have already fallen sharply in the futures market, where bets are made based on what investors think gasoline prices will do in the weeks and months ahead.

On Tuesday, gasoline futures declined 6 cents a gallon even though the Irma threat is still going strong. And the price of near-term futures contracts fell again.

So, I’m waiting for a 27-cent-a-gallon drop in gasoline prices. The longer these high prices remain, the more consumers are being cheated. The Justice Department announced last week that there was no evidence that ex- President Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower as President Trump had alleged. OK, that almost settles the issue. I’m still waiting for the New York Times — the self-proclaimed “paper of record” — to explain its Jan. 20 front page story that had the headline “Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.”

Times reporters were already embarrassed when ex-FBI director

James Comey testified before Congress that one of the paper’s major stories was dead wrong.

In the Jan. 20 story, the Times said “intercepted communications” were being used as part of the case against

Paul Manafort, Tump’s former campaign manager. It does look as though Manafort is in serious trouble, but there is no indication yet that his problems will have any effect on Trump.

So, how can you explain the Times story and the Justice Department conclusion?

Easy: Nobody “wiretaps” phones anymore. So Trump was typically imprecise in the language he used in his accusation. And surveillance — the proper term — isn’t done at a specific location.

The spies can snatch messages from the phone in your pocket or the one in your office without any “bugging” device being planted.

Maybe Trump was a little right in that something was going on. And perhaps even the Times had it correct in the body of the story, but the headline is just plain wrong in the face of the Justice Department’s conclusions.

The “paper of record” needs to set the record straight. Right on schedule after the Labor Day holiday, something came along to bop the stock market. Most knowledgeable Wall Street observers think stocks are in a bubble and — as I recently wrote — there are at least a dozen things that could cause problems for Wall Street during the traditionally nervous fall period. On Tuesday, the latest threats from North Korea and counterthreats from Washington caused the Dow Jones industrial average to decline 234 points, which equals more than 1 percent. Wednesday, the Dow and other indexes, which also fell on Tuesday, recovered a bit. Why did the market care about North Korea at that time when serious problems in that part of the world have been going on for months? Because it’s fall. Real investors are coming back from their vacations. In other words, the grown-ups are again in charge of the markets. .