Oil, oil everywhere

Punters complaining about the exorbitant profits petrol companies are supposedly making with rapidly rising pump prices should look at the charts Bernard Hickey published yesterday to see how local companies have in fact been squeezed between the international price of refined oil, and the amount that governments gouge from motorists in taxes, duties and GST.
                        
It doesn't require a rocket scientist to realise that if anger should be directed anywhere then it's at the government, who take more from every litre delivered at the petrol pump than the owners of the petrol pumps do.

And here's more good oil on oil prices:

• George Reisman exposes the ignorant and dishonest politicians who heap blame on wary oil executives for the consequences of their own reckless and destructive policies.  See  In the U.S. Senate the Guilty Repeat Their Interrogation of the Innocent.
• Robert Murphy on the "big lie" the US Government is telling on inflation.  Murphy fisks the news that "slower than expected overall inflation was due to falling energy prices and flat food prices. Energy fell 0.2 pct, the largest drop since December, while food was unchanged in the month. Within the energy sector, gasoline fell 4.6 pct, the largest drop since December."  And guess what?  It's not exactly true.  See The Government's Statistical Whopper of the Year.
• Ed Cline exposes the facts about the US relationship with Saudi Arabian oil producers that fatarse film-maker Michael Moore might have found if  he had a brain bigger than his stomach.  See Waging the War of Words.