Oil Must Hit $127 A Barrel To Make $4 Gas

The price of a barrel of oil would have to increase more than 25% over its already record-high price to make gasoline cost $4 a gallon at the pump, according to an expert quoted by Newsday.

"In purely mathematical terms, crude oil would have to rise to about $127 a barrel – it settled Friday at $101.72 in New York futures trading after topping $103 overnight – for the national average price of gasoline to rise to $4 from Friday's $3.164 a gallon, says James Ritterbusch, president of Ritterbusch & Associates in Galena, Ill., an oil trading advisory firm."

Few of the factors that made oil speculators spike the price of oil – from inflation and a weak dollar here in the U.S., to rampaging demand in developing nations like China, the threat of violence in Nigeria and the nationalization of oil resources in Venezuela, Kurdish unrest in Iraq and Turkey, etc. etc. – appear ready to disappear anytime soon.

Whether all that adds up to $127 for a barrel of oil, though, is the question. Already, many experts say the price of oil is far higher than its actual price, because of rampant speculation in the market. So watch the news, and watch the price at the pump.

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