Brace yourself, drivers, for a rise in gas prices. How much? Well, here is what’s happening right now. Unrest in Egypt, even the perception of instability in the Middle East can raise oil prices and that filters after about three weeks into gas prices. You also have concerns about inventories because of refinery retooling in this country, also because in Libya and some other countries, you have reduced output.
What does it mean for the price of gasoline? We’ve already seen gas spike quite quickly this summer. $3.55 is the average for unleaded. And you can see that’s lower than a year ago, but it has been moving up quite quickly. And what it means, it means a lot of analysts think you could see 10 to 20 cents per gallon pretty quickly added to the price of gas and that takes money right out of the economy. Every penny increase in the price of gasoline is four million dollars a day out of consumers’ pockets. Let’s talk about where prices have been. These are those records, remember? Right before the financial crisis and the gas prices fell. You can see that over the past several years, the peaks have come in the summer. What happens now? You are gonna see gas prices increase. But many experts are saying, hopefully by September, those prices will come down as they have over the past several years.
Christine Romans, cnn, New York
