As a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, gas prices in the United States have risen to their highest level since 2008. This is due to the disruption of the global energy market.
According to AAA, the average price of a gallon of gasoline hit $4.009 on Sunday, representing a 57-cent rise from a month earlier. The all-time high for gasoline prices occurred in July 2008, when the average price reached $4.114 a gallon.
Due in part to Russia’s increasingly violent war against Ukraine, which has forced more than a million people to flee their homes, there has been intense volatility in the energy markets, which has been exacerbated by the fact that Russia supplies 10% of world oil and more than a third of natural gas consumed in the European Union.
Even supplies of crude oil supplied at a substantial discount have not convinced certain refineries and dealers to continue purchasing crude oil from the nation. As a result of their concerns about falling foul of sanctions by doing business with Russia, refiners, shippers, insurers, and banks are scaling down their operations. Ukraine’s authorities have called on other nations to discontinue their purchases of Russian oil, and lawmakers in the United States have started to support this position.
Oil prices jumped by 7 percent to $118 a barrel on Friday, according to Brent oil, the worldwide benchmark for petroleum. Early in December, the price of a barrel of oil was around $65 per barrel.
Gas prices had already begun to rise before to the pandemic, in part as a consequence of variations in supply and demand, and they continued to rise throughout the epidemic. People have been forced to rejig their family budgets as a result of the higher costs, sometimes by foregoing leisure activities and in other instances by cutting down on spending on necessities. Gas costs are at an all-time high, which is contributing to inflation, which hit a 40-year high in January.
Consumer prices are expected to have increased 7.9 percent in the year through February, according to economists, according to the Consumer Price Index, which will be released on Thursday. Consumer prices jumped 0.8 percent from the previous month, according to economists. That would be an increase from the 7.5 percent recorded in the year through January, demonstrating that inflation has not reached its pinnacle.
