The wife came home from shopping yesterday and happily reported that the price of gas is under $3 per gallon. Not much under $3, at $2.999, but under.
There's been a cloud over me lately, the concern that fighting inflation leads to recession, and that strong-willed cutting of federal spending turns recession into depression -- What, me worry? -- so when the she said the price of gas was down, between my ears I pictured it as global demand for gasoline, down because of the oncoming depression.
Hey, it could happen. But I always tend to think worst-case. I don't see actual evidence that things are going bad any faster than usual. Maybe it's all between my ears. Still, I suddenly wanted to look at a picture of the price of gasoline.
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| FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000074714 |
The graph shows a national average price for unleaded regular (for cities, if I read the graph title right).
We use unleaded regular but we don't live in The City of Average Prices, and I have no idea how yesterday's price stands in relation to FRED's averages. But I put a red extension on the end of the gas price line, to bring the number down from November's $3.181 to the local $2.999 for January 5, 2025.
For context, I also show three little red dots on the graph, for March of 2020, 2021, and 2022. March of 2022 is when the Fed started increasing the interest rate to fight inflation. The average price of gas peaked above $5 per gallon in June of 2022, then started working its way back down.
I notice that the low points since June 2022 occur in December 2022 and about a year later in January 2024. If this is "seasonal" behavior, we could be at another low now. And the price of gasoline could soon be going up again.
But for now, anyway, I can see that gasoline prices are lower than they've been for a while. The wife was right.
PS: I did say "I don't see actual evidence that things are going bad any faster than usual." But I don't have a satisfactory way to measure that.
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