Possible Good News – A Gasoline Price Drop Would Help.

/ Jim Luke

Ronald White of tthe LA Times brings us this nugget via CalculatedRiskBlog:

Since I haven’t posted on gasoline prices in some time … from Ronald White at the LA Times: Gas prices expected to fall

“If oil remains low, the national average for gasoline will fall to $3.25 to $3.40 in the next two to three weeks as retailers slowly lower their prices to reflect their drop in cost,” said Patrick DeHaan, senior energy analyst for GasBuddy.com, a website that lists retail gasoline prices.

Another price decline would be good news, but it just takes us back close to the late February and early March levels – and March is when Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) growth slowed, and consumer sentiment fell sharply.
If this comes to happen, then it raises the chances of avoiding another drop in GDP  and another recession.  It’s the first positive contingency I’ve seen for quite awhile.  Most of the “if this happens…” around today are all negative: Eurozone collapses, Bank of America hits more losses, state and local governments continue to layoff workers, etc.  Of course, gas prices dropping depends on oil prices staying down, and that depends on the big banks and hedge funds not speculating in the oil markets to drive them up.