gasoline is a commodity like lumber and steel, milk, gold...etc..

The Chinese are gobbling up the scrap metal at an alarming pace and that is why the price of steel products such as framing for construction has been skyrocketing...ask a contractor. Lumber wars with Canada and exporting so many logs overseas have helped shoot those prices up. Gasoline is also a commodity being used much more by China than ever before..and they have none of their own capacity...figure it out....Opportunism is commodity markets is nothing new and certainly does not operate along any party lines. If we were to get some really good news from the war on terrorism (heaven forbid) we would probably see some knee jerk price drops. Same goes for more bad news...the other way.