If Twitter accepted messages of more than 280 characters, Jeff Bezos might have tried, this Sunday, July 3, to give an economics lesson to the President of the United States. Faced with this impossibility, he contented himself with wondering aloud, with a certain aplomb, about Joe Biden’s remarks concerning gas prices, wondering if the president was seeking “to create a diversion” or publicly displaying his “lack of understanding of market dynamics”.
The day before, also on Twitter, Joe Biden had called on companies operating service stations and setting prices at the pump to lower the cost of gasoline for citizens. In June, the price per gallon, the equivalent of 3.8 litres, exceeded the $5 mark in places. And if it has since fallen a little, it is still too large a sum for many American households. Arguing from the difficult situation internationally, the president called for a form of solidarity from oil companies towards the Americans.
The boss of Amazon found himself very irritated, considering that the prices of the courses were fixed on the world market, and that the oil giants were therefore subject to dynamics which exceeded them too. Accused of incompetence, the White House reacted, replying through the voice of its spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre, that “crude prices had fallen by around 15 dollars over the past month”, without the prices at the pump do not come down.
For his part, John Kirby, Joe Biden’s communications coordinator, replied to Jeff Bezos that the president was working “very hard to try to lower prices”, and that, of course, he understood economic logic well. During the summer, the president could decide to suspend the federal tax on gasoline in order to lower the price per gallon by about a dollar. In any case, on Twitter, American citizens seem, this Monday, to have taken up the cause of their president.
