Why are so many people so poorly informed about how these things work?
The crude oil that people are paying less than $69 today will not be delivered to refineries until December and will not start being sold as gasoline until January; which is the (primary) reason why gas prices seem to take so long to drop. The reason why it seems like gas prices rise so quickly is people (rarely) pay attention to rising oil prices until they have been rising for some time.
There are a couple of reasons oil prices have been falling so quickly lately, there has been a drop off in demad due to higher gas prices and a slowing ecconomy, and speculators have been pushed out of the market because of low availability of credit and the increased risk of lower priced oil.
