U.S Gasoline Stocks - Have They Breached Minimum Operating Levels? [GRAPH]

Don't panic when you look at the graph below. What I can say is the US is so preoccupied with electioneering and banks imploding every other day, no one has noticed gasoline supplies have dropped like a stone. Implications - shortages around the world, and very high oil prices towards Christmas.

Here's an interesting comment from TheOilDrum.com:
I was lurking on a baseball blog last night. A couple of people from western North Carolina started discussing the gas shortage. Apparently, it's pretty bad there. One guy was sleeping at his office because he didn't have the gas to get home. He tried, ran out of gas, and ended up pushing his car off the road and walking back to his office. Another guy in the area had heard about a town that had gas, and last I looked, they were trying to figure out if he could get enough gas there to drive to the first guy's office and let him siphon some.

clipped from www.theoildrum.com We know that Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Ike had a huge impact on refineries, and that these production shortfalls are now slowly making their way through pipelines. It is my view that because Texas refineries have been fairly slow to get back online, and because of the built-in lag due to the slow travel of refined products through pipelines, the present gasoline shortages are likely to get worse in the next two to three weeks. Over the last four weeks, crude oil imports have averaged 8.5 million barrels per day, about 1.8 million barrels per day below the same four-week period last year.