Oil Prices

Exxon profit up record 58 percent for quarter In what will probably be the high-water mark for corporate profits for a while, Exxon Mobil reported yesterday that it broke its own record for the largest quarterly profit ever by a U.S. company, as oil prices hit a record over the summer and gasoline soared well above $4 a gallon across the nation. Exxon and other oil companies have seen their profits soar thanks to rising oil prices, but the last quarter might signal the end of the boom years.

Hurricane Ike unleashed its fury at gas pumps yesterday, with prices surging even as crude oil dropped to a five-month low of less than $100 a barrel. The hurricane shuttered refineries located around the Gulf of Mexico, limiting the availability of gasoline. That drove prices for gasoline upward. But without refineries to process crude oil into gasoline, demand for oil fell. The falling demand, coupled with relief from initial reports that drilling in the Gulf appeared to survive Ike relatively unscathed, helped bring crude oil prices to their lows during a special trading session yesterday.

As oil costs surged this year, manufacturers raised the prices of a lot of products - not just gasoline but lotions, toothpaste, plastics and many more that use oil as a raw material. Now oil costs are plunging, but other prices are not. Even though oil prices have fallen toward $100 a barrel from $147 less than two months ago, many companies that cited higher energy costs for increasing prices are resisting a rollback, saying they still need to recover money lost in the run-up. Crude oil prices slid yesterday $5.75 a barrel to $109.

Oil prices fall by more than $6 a barrel NEW YORK - Oil prices tumbled more than $6 a barrel yesterday - the biggest one-day percentage plunge in nearly four years - after a rebounding dollar and a Russian troop pullback in Georgia sparked another frenzied sell-off. Crude oil's nose dive wiped out all the gains from the previous day's big rally and reaffirmed the belief that high energy prices are still cutting into consumer demand for fossil fuels in the U.S. and overseas. Light sweet crude for October delivery fell $6.59, or 5.43 percent, to settle at $114.

LANSING, Mich. - With the politics of energy shifting as rapidly as gasoline prices, Democrats, led by Barack Obama, are retreating from long-held positions and scrambling to offer distressed voters more immediate relief from spiraling costs. The change has been most striking on the campaign trail, where Obama said in a speech yesterday that he would abandon his past position and support tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to quickly cut prices at the gasoline pump. His presidential campaign later released a statement warning that the "doubling of oil prices in the past year is a crisis for millions of Americans."

Former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm got in trouble when he said Americans are mired not in an economic contraction but in a "mental recession." He soon had to step down as co-chairman of Sen. John McCain's campaign for committing the ultimate political sin: telling the truth about a misperception that happens to be very popular. Americans feel as though the economy is in a recession and want the government to do something about it. In reality, it is expanding. In the second quarter, it grew at a respectable inflation-adjusted rate of 1.9 percent, double the pace of the first quarter.

The farmer drove a diesel-powered hay baler in a circuit around his field, followed by his son on a clattering machine that grabbed the bales with metal fingers. Edward F. Stanfield, 77, and his son, Edward B. Stanfield, 49, have followed this oil-inspired choreography for decades on their 600-acre farm in the Randallstown area of Baltimore County. Like farmers around the world, they grow their hay, corn and soybeans with petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, harvest them with diesel combines, pack them with oil-based plastic and ship them in diesel trucks.

HOUSTON - Oil prices headed in an unusual direction - down - for the second consecutive day yesterday, leaving energy experts to wonder whether the drop is the beginning of a lasting trend or just a brief pause before another surge. Oil settled at $136.04 a barrel, a drop of $5.33, or 3.8 percent. Analysts said the immediate causes included the strengthening of the dollar in recent days and the apparent veering northward of Bertha, the first hurricane of the 2008 hurricane season, meaning it was likely to miss the oil and natural gas facilities in the Gulf of Mexico.