Richard Steele
Last week I saw a comparison of petrol prices between service stations in the King Country, and 40 cents a litre difference was quoted in towns barely 100km apart.
Then I noted this morning the large shipping company Maersk was putting their shipping costs up 27 per cent, and in the same article Marley the spouting and plumbing type manufacturers, putting their prices up 20 per cent.
And that I’m sure, is but the tip of the iceberg. My point is that business all over is going to take the opportunity when and where they can, to put prices up, whether they need to or not, and that we, the consumers, have no option but to shut up and pay up.
We should all blame Donald Trump for attacking Iran, and the justification for that is another matter, for the distortion in the free flow of oil worldwide.
But here’s the question – if only 20 per cent of the world’s oil flows through the strait of Hormuz, what’s happened to the other 80 per cent that never goes near the place, why isn’t that 80 per cent keeping the oil prices around the rest of the world at a more reasonable level?
It’s quite likely that I’m just naive, or that everyone in the whole worldwide supply chain is taking the opportunity, to make more money out of us long suffering people, just because they can.
Are these the unforeseen results of an unfortunate war, or a cunning plot, a Trumpian plot to divert attention from the Epstein embarrassment – or even more simply, to divert attention away from the failing American economy?
I don’t know what to do about this, other than to drive less, and then I make the rest of the economy suffer.
I’m sure this fine newspaper has many illustrious readers who can make a real difference, but to change the minds of some of the loopy bastards currently running the world into the ground seems like a task that’s too big for us.
The bastions of the American economy have for generations been the oil giants, and from my readings, they are self-sufficient in oil. If that’s the case, and I’m sure it is, then why or how can their oil prices go up so much due to a fight their dear leader started halfway around the world from them?
Spare a thought for our political leaders, who are battling an increasingly out of control economy caused entirely offshore.
I don’t give a fat rat about the American consumer, in that he or she or they, are getting exactly what they voted for. It’s us downstream people in smaller allied nations, who are face an increasingly expensive cost of living, and from where I sit, the only way out of this mess is for us to be more self-sufficient.
We need a long term, sustainable outcome, to be independent of the next oil shock.
