The first stage to price gouging is hoarding. If you hoard your supplies of anything that you bought at a lower price. And wait for the supplies elsewhere to drop until the price for the goods rises, you make a profit. So isn’t it any wonder that Oil prices tumble on fuel report that ‘showed that US petrol reserves have increased.’
Lets get serious here, they either caught the oil companies hoarding. Or the government told them to reveal what they really had on reserve. Either way the oil companies were either forcing the price up, or were expecting the price to rise.
And you wonder why the Bolivians took back control of an economic resource from private hands. Bolivia gas under state control