Reports: $2 Gas Prices Could Happen in Some States By Christmas
Hey folks in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Tennessee! You might be seeing something in the coming weeks that you haven’t seen in more than five years. No, we aren’t talking about relevant college football teams, we’re talking about $2 gas prices.
According to Bloomberg, pockets of the United States (probably in the Southeast) will begin seeing $2 gas prices sometime between now and Christmas. It’s likely that up to eight states could see prices below $2 before Christmas: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.
As it stands, the national average of gas in the South and Midwest are hovering around the $2.25 mark, so it wouldn’t take much more of a drop to get prices at the pump in certain areas down to that coveted-and-yet-seemingly-unattainable $1.99 mark.
“We could see the cheapest 1 percent of stations get within a few pennies of $1.99 over the next two weeks,” Patrick DeHaan, a senior petroleum analyst at GasBuddy Organization Inc., told Bloomberg last week. “We’ll see at least one station in the nation at $2 by Christmas. And that’s not really a prediction at all. That’s more like a certainty.”
According to IHS, should these prices hold steady, the rapid decrease in fuel prices over the last several months could mean around $500 in extra disposable income annually for Americans.
Bloomberg notes that the last time the national average gas price was below $2 was back on March 24, 2009.
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