Crude fell hard on Monday and the coverage wrote itself: relief at the pump, pressure off the Fed.
Here is what the pump actually did. AAA's national average for regular gasoline read $4.110. The previous day it read $4.110 [1]. Unchanged, for a second consecutive day.
Meanwhile the wholesale input moved a lot. RBOB gasoline futures fell 12.31 cents, from $3.4504 to $3.3273 a gallon - down 3.57 percent on the session [2]. September WTI settled at $82.61, which works out to $1.967 of crude per gallon [2].
The year-over-year numbers are where this stops being a curiosity. Regular is up 96.5 cents on the year, from $3.145 - a rise of 30.68 percent. On the month it is up 23.2 cents. On the week, 10.7 cents [1].
Every one of those directions is up, on a day the input fell.
Diesel is worse and matters more, because it is a cost inside the price of everything that moves by truck. It stands at $5.296, up a tenth of a cent on the day and up $1.561 on the year - 41.79 percent [1].
Put it in a tank. A 15-gallon fill costs $14.48 more than it did last July. A trucker filling a 150-gallon tank pays $234 more than a year ago, per fill.
The geography is its own story: California at $5.648 against Texas at $3.689 [1], a spread of $1.96 a gallon for the same commodity in the same country.
None of this establishes that anyone is holding prices up deliberately. Retail gasoline is known to fall more slowly than it rises, and inventory bought at the old wholesale price is a real explanation for part of a lag.
What the day establishes is narrower and checkable: the input fell 3.57 percent, the pump did not move at all, and that is the second day it has not moved.
