Saturday, November 2, 2013

$3.19 gas has arrived; Professor Farnsworth approves

I repeated a prediction in The corner station does a dead cat bounce off the floor.
I made an observation and a prediction in Farnsworth is still yelling "Whee!"
About 5PM, I went out and saw that the corner station was at $3.24 and the three stations down the street were at $3.22.  Things have already gotten better, and the window of comparison is still open for another week.
...
If things go according to pattern, the corner station will match the rest at $3.22, which means that $3.19 is only three cents away.  Stay tuned.
Just about an hour ago, I went out and saw that all four neighborhood stations had lowered their prices from $3.22 to $3.19.  That means, as I pointed out in Professor Farnsworth likes yelling "Whee" on the gas price rollercoaster, that the corner gas station has set a new low for the year while the rest of the neighborhood stations have matched theirs.  It also means that gas is now a dime below where it was last year on this date.  Furthermore, the corner station has only four cents to go before it matches its low for last year, while the rest of the stations have eleven cents to match their low of $3.08, which they reached the week before Christmas.  That's six to seven weeks away.  I'm sure they'll hit those lows before then and then pass right through them.

The GasBuddy widget at Econobrowser supports my prediction.  The Detroit average dropped from $3.26 on Thursday to $3.24 today, undercutting the current U.S. mean of $3.26 and a fraction.  The Michigan average is still catching up (or is it down?) with the Detroit trend, falling from $3.34 to $3.31.

Decreasing gas prices are reflecting falling crude prices.  Oil-price.net lists WTI as having dropped $1.77 (1.87%) to $94.61 on Friday, while Brent fell even more, $2.93 (2.77%) to $105.91.  As long as crude oil falls, gas will sink along with it.

I finished with someone else's predictions.
Gas prices are expected to continue falling until the end of the year, as MLive reported this week.
GasBuddy.com Senior Petroleum Analyst Patrick DeHaan last week said he wouldn't be surprised to see prices fall even lower, perhaps under $3 a gallon by the Thanksgiving holiday and into December.
I'll wait until I see prices fall before posting Professor Farnsworth again.
The waiting is over.

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