Comment on the November 11 prediction: Not too hard to predict that prices will drop over the weekend. They stayed above $3.40 in a lot of places, though, so I am going to score this as 1/2 CORRECT, 1/2 WRONG.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011, 7:40PM: How is the rest of this week going to play out? You may be hearing that oil prices are soaring (now over $100 a barrel), but wholesale gas prices have been steady this week after dropping a lot last week, apparently due to weak demand. We need to get down to $3.15 or so before there is a hike, so I predict that we will be safe until at least Monday. Diesel, on the other hand, continues to rise, due to shortages in the Midwest. This link from GasBuddy explains why. –Ed Aboufadel
5:40 p.m. Friday
The Chicago spot closed down another 2.87¢ (1.2%) to $2.36215 today. This puts the Michigan spike line at $3.028919. With Michigan’s average for regular unleaded gasoline currently $3.335, the spike line has a very healthy 30.6081¢ margin. Unless the market rockets up on Monday, I expect we will get through the Thanksgiving holiday without an increase. The soonest I would expect a reset (increase) now is the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, November 29.
In other news, it appears the Grand Rapids Press will be firing 15 reporters on Monday, January 2. The Kalamazoo Gazette will be firing 5 reporters on that date. You think the newspapers’ parent company was trying to be nice, but it appears that by firing them after the new year, they will have to pay only 20 weeks of unemployment instead of 26. Here are the details: http://www.woodtv.com/dpp/news/local/grand_rapids/Grand-Rapids-Press-Kalamazoo-Gazette-to-lay-off-233
If you read the WARN letters, you’ll see Publisher and Editor are among the 223 positions being eliminated. These newspapers are turning into little more than printed blogs. They’ve essentially outsourced their copy editing to the on-line readers.