[Harry Lime]

Ah, a few other people have come in and said that the correlation deviated over the last three years, and you seem ok with that.

The 'graphs' comment was a dick move, I'll give you that. I just had better things to do, and there are people more saturated in the minutiae than I who could better illustrate the nature of the argument opposite to yours.

It took me about four minutes to find a timeline, and pull this example.

2013 - Oil rose swiftly to $118.90/barrel on February 8. This sent gas prices to $3.85/gallon by February 25. Prices had started rising earlier than normal because of Iran's aggressive war games near the Strait of Hormuz.

The oil industry collectively acts like a frightened rabbit if it is in their economic interest. Clearly an excuse to raise prices, as no one in their right mind thought that Iran was about to start sinking ships in the strait, or close their most important economic portal. When the games completed, there was no immediate jump back to the norm, even given the correction for the time of year. The higher price due to the minor threat to supply was used as the new base cost for gasoline.

You can't see how behavior like this is frustrating to a consumer?

(As an aside, I took about 30 seconds to google 'gasoline price connection to oil price' and pull the first BC based article knowing that it would be littered with graphs. I was being an ass, and I'll own that)

edit : as an aside, the brinksmanship over the Strait of Hormuz is fun to get into. The reaction by England, USA and the EU was designed to impress on Iran just how outmatched they were if they wanted to get testy, and Iran did a lot of awesome fist shaking. This was going on since December 2011, so the war games weren't exactly out of the blue.