During the course of last week the price of petrol was falling at about a penny a day at our local Shell garage.
During the summer, prices had risen locally as high as 98p per litre. That's well over £5 per gallon in old money. Other places round the UK broke the £1 per litre barrier.
We're back down to 10p cheaper. That's almost where we were two years ago.
Why? Why the price hike? Why the price drop?
Apparently, the flow of crude oil has not peaked at all. There has been no depletion of stocks. There was a mild blip after Hurricane Katrina took out the oil installations on the Mexican Gulf but that was quickly balanced by increased production from the Saudi States.
No, it's all been to do with gambling on oil futures on the stock exchanges of the world. The specific issue was Iranian nuclear power. The gamble was that Iranian insistence on producing nuclear power would cause a crisis/war that would shut down oil production in the Middle East. Therefore, oil would be scare in the future. Therefore, buy into oil now and force the price up.
But the crisis hasn't happened. And now seems unlikely to happen in the near future. So those people who bought into oil futures in the summer are now revising their positions. Or rather they are dumping stock and so the price falls.
Some people will have made a lot of money out of this. Other will have lost a bundle as well. I'm pleased neither way. I don't see why the economies of the world should be held to ransom by racketeers and gamblers.
Speaking of which, a major beneficiary of all this nonsense must be the British treasury. A 10% devaluation of the price of fuel has to help their inflation targets. I gather that a new gas pipeline from Norway has also just opened although it will be the New Year before its presence translates into lower prices in the domestic tariffs.
All this is looking good for Gordon Brown to be able to leave office as Chancellor For A Decade next May - presumably one of the longest serving Chancellors ever since they tend not to last as long as their Prime Ministers - and to leave with the economy in as pretty much as sound a state as John Major gifted it to him in 1997.