by Calculated Risk on 11/17/2013 09:19:00 PM

From Professor Hamilton at Econbrowser: Lower gasoline prices

Americans are indeed facing the lowest gasoline prices in almost three years, but not by much. The price of gasoline last December was almost as low as it is now, as it also had been in December 2011. The fact is, U.S. gasoline prices are usually lower in the fall and winter than they are in the spring and summer due to seasonal variation in gasoline demand and fuel formulations.
...
So why hasn't the surge in U.S. production of crude oil brought any real decrease in the price of oil and gasoline? The answer is pretty simple. If you leave out the growth in shale oil production from the U.S. and oil sands production from Canada, total field production of crude oil from the rest of the world combined actually decreased between 2005 and 2012. Given the increase from the U.S. and Canada, global production managed to increase by 2 million barrels a day over the period, but that's less than the growth in consumption from the emerging economies and oil-producing countries over those same years. That's why the world price of oil went up, not down, despite the growth in production from the U.S. and Canada.

Monday:
• 10:00 AM ET: The November NAHB homebuilder survey. The consensus is for a reading of 55, unchanged from October. Any number above 50 indicates that more builders view sales conditions as good than poor.

Weekend:
• Schedule for Week of November 17th

The Nikkei is up about 0.3%.

From CNBC: Pre-Market Data and Bloomberg futures: the S&P futures are down 3 and DOW futures are down 15 (fair value).

Oil prices are mixed with WTI futures at $93.60 per barrel and Brent at $108.32 per barrel.