Crude oil prices reportedly “worried” investors yesterday, perhaps because there was nothing more menacing in the news. But look at the chart below. It doesn’t take a technician to see that the current uptrend in prices is yet another gratuitous stab into the mid $60s, as likely to be followed by a $4 or $5 decline as high tide is by low.  Face it, if Katrina couldn’t push spot quotes up to $100 a barrel, what would?**  But prices at the pump are another matter. I’ve never put $50 of gas into a car’s tank, but I came pretty close yesterday and would have achieved that dubious milestone if there hadn’t been a couple of gallons left in the tank. I hadn’t filled it in quite a while and was therefore unaware that premium had crept back up to $2.65 a gallon hereabouts. Ordinarily, the local newspapers keep this story in our faces, but I guess we’ve all been conditioned by now to simply shrug off anything less than $3 a gallon. But do the editors know that seasonal factors are actually restraining gasoline prices at the moment and that a 30% increase between now and the beginning of summer would not be the least bit unusual? If so, they’ve kept pretty quiet about it.

** Yes, I know: a sidewinder missile taking out a supertanker in the Strait of Hormuz or the Suez Canal. But so far, most fortunately, the world’s luck has held out.