As the price of oil surges to record highs, the Telegraph and the Express lead on the rising costs faced by motorists. There is anecdotal evidence, the Telegraph reports, that drivers are "downsizing" their vehicles because fuel costs for family cars are now so high. Some face bills of more than £70 when filling up popular saloons.
While environmentalists welcome higher petrol prices so drivers are forced to consider ditching their Chelsea tractors, the Express is up in arms at the burden on motorists. It has launched a "crusade" to force the government to cut fuel taxes. The Treasury, it says, has enjoyed a £505m windfall since April 1 alone from oil prices, which today hit $135 a barrel.
London is set to grind to a halt next week, according to the paper, when 1,000 lorries take to the streets to deliver a petition over rising fuel prices.
Anatole Kaletsky provides an interesting corrective to the oil price hysteria. The Times' economics commentator argues that the present commodity and oil boom shows all the classic symptoms of a financial bubble. What has changed in the last nine months, he asks. Nothing is the answer. Here's how he explains the doubling of oil prices since last August:
"The Gulf... is crammed with supertankers chartered by oil-producing governments to hold the inventories of oil they are pumping but cannot sell. That physical oil is in excess supply at today's prices does not mean that producers are somehow cheating by storing their oil tankers or keeping it in the ground. All it suggests is that there are few buyers for physical oil cargoes at today's prices, but there are plenty of buyers for pieces of paper linked to the price of oil next month and next year."
That accounts for the reluctance of Opec, the oil cartel that argues there is plenty of supply, to pump more oil. As Kaletsky points out, in the late stages of financial bubbles, it is quite normal for prices to become completely detached from economic fundamentals.
* This is an extended extract from the Wrap, our daily digest of the day's papers
