During an interview aired on Friday’s edition of Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week,” economist, Harvard Professor, Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton Larry Summers responded to President Joe Biden’s tweet accusing oil and gas companies of padding their profits by keeping gas prices high by stating, “there’s nothing that would support that in the president’s tweet, and I haven’t seen any analysis coming out of the administration, or anyplace else, that provided serious support for that.”
Summers said, “I wish the president got more help from his economic advisers. Those spreads between gasoline prices and refined prices vary substantially on a range of factors. There [are] lags between the price of oil and the price of gasoline. When natural gas is in short supply, when diesel is in desperately short supply, it affects the mix of products that refiners provide and ways to change that spread. Maybe there is a basis for thinking that profits are being padded, but there’s nothing that would support that in the president’s tweet, and I haven’t seen any analysis coming out of the administration, or anyplace else, that provided serious support for that.”
He continued, “Look, at a time when we have a war to fight, at a time when energy security is a central issue for us, at a time when, over time, we’re going to have to cooperate with our energy companies on the necessary transition away from fossil fuels, I think we should be very careful about accusing them of bad behavior, unless we’ve got clear evidence. Now, the administration may have clear evidence, and if so, I’ll be the first to admit that and to want to look and evaluate the evidence. But this kind of comparison that was contained in the president’s tweet, I’m afraid does not represent that kind of clear evidence.”
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