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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (228522)	4/9/2005 11:54:39 PM
From: i-node	Respond to of 1578495

>>> Gross margins can stay approximately flat while allowing profits to double This is true, but one cannot infer from this fact that price gouging is occurring. I believe it is true that no new refineries have been built in 20 years or more. Today, a billion dollars is not a huge barrier to entry to this kind of market. Why hasn't it been done? If the profits are so huge, the markets ought to operate to bring some kind of equillibrium to bear on the problem. The reason, of course, is that in any given year, or even longer period, you can have prices going up, LIFO stock depleted, other expenses going up and down, all of which can affect oil company profits. You have to evaluate these things over extended periods, and to arbitrarily pick out the last 3 or 4 years and say, "Oil company profits are soaring because oil is soaring" is sort of jumping to conclusions. Anyway, you make a good argument.