>>But you did make a point - it would have been natural to raise the price in 2003, but they didn't.
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>http://www.randomuseless.info/gasprice/gasprice.html
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>The price of gas in 2003 was the same in 2001 (9/11, presumably).
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>Maybe they manipulated it down for 2002, in the best interest of the world, took a profit hit, and then worked their way back after life started getting back to normal.

That's the only time I think they were actually unable to manipulate it. The fearmongering was so loud aftr 9/11 that the roads were rather empty for months. Note the depth and width of the dip in the graph in the last quarter of 2001. The fear of travel ran so deep that I remember seeing the price of gas veer around $1.05 for weeks, with occasional dips below the dollar line. I once even filled up for $.899/gal, and that was in the DC area, about January 2002 or so.

They had to make up for this sooner or later, and "in the best interest of the world" is good for one wry chuckle.

>You made the point we don't know what gas prices would be like on the natural path because we don't have an alternative universe.
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>But that's my point. That before we say something like "Bush lives on another planet because he things the housing market is the reason for the economies condition, not the war", maybe we should have some evidence to back up that assertion.
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>If we want to examine the situation objectively, that is, rather than automatically promoting and defending our biases.

I can't promote my bias any further, it's already a four star general bias. Being a general, I think it can defend itself ;).

Bush may be a bit right at the moment, in that there's nothing that war contributed to economic troubles in this year that wasn't there in the previous two years, and that the housing market is the main course on the table now. But then, it's superficial (which surprises me from this guy). It's not actually the housing market that caused anything per se - it's the investors' push that pumped the bubble until it burst just as it did with the previous one in 2000. Again, housing isn't so much of the problem by itself, it's the bad loans crisis.

It's caused by the thesis that everyone, every middleman in the chain must make more profits than last year (or at least must show growing potential) or they're dead (on Walmart Street). Chain letters always run out of new victims, and that's why it all bursts.

One of the reasons that the capitalism survived was that it has found a mechanism to avert its cyclic nature and skip the crises before they happen. With Reaganomics, someone had the bright idea that the bubble/bust cycle is something that can actually make money in the process (money for those who press the buttons, screw everyone else), so the bubbles are sped up. The dot com bubble ran its course from what, 1993 or so until 2000. The housing market ran 2004-2007. We'll see what's next - Harper's has had a nice analysis a couple of months ago of how it may be working.