Oil companies are not supermarkets competing for custom by offering the lowest prices. The price of energy is decided by world markets, which are external to the oil companies, were they to get together to try and manipulate prices, there would be outrage. There are laws against companys working together to control prices.
But a huge question mark hovers over the 'markets' that determine oil prices.
This is interesting from economist Ann Pettifor
Why are governments impotent?
In an age of economic and ecological crises
While supply and demand have undoubtedly played a role in the dramatic volatility of oil, gas and food prices, the real cause of rising high prices (and their subsequent crashes) lies elsewhere. Understanding this matters because the astronomical rise in the oil price has had severe, and in some places catastrophic consequences for the world’s people. And the oil price shock has accelerated climate breakdown. Carbon emissions have risen as countries fire up coal mines to substitute for costlier fossil fuels.
Why are these chaotic price swings and their dire consequences not managed or mitigated? Why are powerful governments – and central banks – impotent in the face the economic, ecological, and political turbulence caused by this market?
The answer lies in the way in which deregulation empowered those active in financial markets. Prices of commodities in those markets are determined by speculators on Wall St and and at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange – not by politicians in Riyadh or Moscow. Not by the CEOs of global oil companies like BP or EXXON.
Not even by rising demand.
Instead prices are set on global futures, options and derivatives markets, where investors and traders speculate on the direction of the price of oil, and thereby affect the ‘spot’ (or current) price.
As the US Energy Information Administration explains, there are differences between participants in these two marketplaces for oil. Commercial’ traders (e.g. oil producers and airlines) buy and sell physical quantities of oil. ‘Non-commercial’ traders (Banks, hedge funds, commodity trading advisors, and other money managers with towering portfolios) don’t buy or sell oil. They simply buy, sell and speculate on financial instruments - futures contracts and derivatives - embodied in pieces of paper.
The system, the global economic order - designed by economists and central bankers and endorsed by elected politicians - licenses and empowers the owners of capital to drive their capital at whim across borders and to use that capital for rent-seeking and speculation. They may do so without regard to the consequences for a nation’s exchange rate, its public finances or its essential commodity markets.
annpettifor.substack.com/p/why-are-western-governments-impotent
Those windfall profits are purely a result of speculation by those who have no concerns about its effect on national economies... It's quite horrifying in a way...
The same speculators nearly crashed the global economy in 2008...
