Archive for the ‘Prices’ Category

Moldova does not know who should get the money for the gas!

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

The Moldovan people do not know whether the gas received by Moldova during the gas crisis must be payed to Ukraine or to Russia. Therefore, they did the logical thing: decided not to pay for the moment. ;)

Note:
This is not filed under the Jokes category!

Note:
Comments are no longer allowed on this post. Looks like it is the only way to stop the spammers.

Intel closes fabs

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

Intel decided to close five of their manufacturing facilities in Asia (one in Philippines, two in Malaysia) and US (Santa Clara, Oregon).

Does this mean people no longer buy enough computers or is this move supposed to stop the drop in processor prices?

Either way, the crisis starts to affect the hardware industry.

France Helps Auto Industry

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

It looks like the France government will help the troubled auto industry by giving Renault, Citroen and Peugeot a total of five or six billion euro.

So, the companies will have a little more money, but I do not think the real problem will be solved. When there are no customers, the companies cannot survive even if the state gives them money. OK, they do have customers, but their number decreases every month. And getting money from the state will allow the companies to cut prices, allowing more people to buy a new car.

But, most people are not interested in buying cars now. They just want to keep their jobs! If they have some money, they think it is better to save them for the time when they’ll lose the job instead of spending them on a car. If someone gets a loan to buy a car now, his or her IQ must be pretty low! :)

Less gas for Balkans

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

Today, it was announced that the Balkan countries that import Russian gas did not received the agreed amount of gas. There was no reaction from the European Union, because countries like Bulgaria and Romania do not really matter.

A few hours later, it was reported that Germany starts to have problems and now the European Union considers that the situation is unacceptable. Isn’t that funny? :)

No gas for Ukraine

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

Russia announced it sopped delivering gas to Ukraine. It looks like the two parties did not reach an agreement for the gas price.

Since Russia asked for a lot more money, there are strong suggestions there exist political reasons behind this crisis.

Anyway, we have a market economy. I guess Ukraine is allowed to buy gas from elsewhere… ;) Unfortunately, there are no other reliable vendors.

Russia has a strong position in this matter and is able to dictate. Probably, soon enough, other countries will start having big problems with Russia!

Oil Prices and Gas Prices

Friday, November 21st, 2008

It makes sense the gas price to rise when oil price rises and to drop when oil price drops. But, it looks like people do not want to understand that the gas price increase / decrease cannot be directly proportional to the oil price increase / decrease.

Oil price has now dropped below 50 USD a barrel from a 147 USD high (almost three times). There are people who are asking why the gas price hasn’t drop three times and complain about it. They tend to forget that, when the oil price rose, the gas price did not rose proportionally. At that time, they complained about the gas price rise, but they did not think it might get worst.

On the other side, the gas vendors are not fair either. Let’s suppose that, at some moment in the past, the gas price was X and the oil price was Y. During a period of time the oil price moved to Y + y; for this reason, the gas price moved to X + x (as mentioned, we have y / Y > x / X). When the oil price dropped back to Y, the gas price only dropped to X + xx (xx < x, but xx > 0). Therefore, even if the oil price is now the same as it was some time in the past, we now pay for gas a little bit more than we payed at that time.

The conclusion is, that oil and gas prices do not move in sync, but when oil price rises, gas price quickly rises too and when oil price drops, gas price does not drop as quickly as they rose :)

We should not expect that, if the oil price returns to a certain level, the gas price will also return to the same level. Fair? I do not think so! To be expected? Certainly!