What are YOU paying for diesel???

[Preen59]

We use guys in China and they get paid 50 bucks a week....they are happy to be earning anything at all.

Yeah, it's awful. Most of the parts in our fridges come from china now. Wiring harnesses, compressors, condensers, evaporators and many plastic components. Its bad to have to buy parts in from O/S, but the factory wouldn't be open still if we didn't do it.

[Golf Houso]

China is taking resources from everywhere! Whether it's oil, tool steels, ore, coal, whatever, they are driving up prices elsewhere.

What happens is that China takes the majority of the consumables, and what is left over is what we all scrap for. So it's supply and demand. The small (comparatively) amount that we buy here is four to five hundred percent of the cost of what China is paying for it in some cases.

Put it this way.. At work, we get plastic moulds from china CHEAPER than what we can buy the material for here! They're crap moulds and we nearly always have to modify them to get them to work the way we want, but still, you can see my point.

Fair point, but keep in mind that the Chinese pay THE SAME for their fuel (per barrel) and diesel than we do here. What your talking about has much more to do with economies of scale, lower labour costs and the efficiencies they have over there which they have developed and nothing to do with the price of fuel.
One interesting suggestion in why fuel prices are so high is that they are being manipulated, legitimately, in order to cash into the constantly growing demand for oil and other resources in China as they grow.

Its really the TNC's and their various governments that are at fault, not the Chinese. Do they have to arrest their economic growth so you can have slightly cheaper fuel? Thats truly unreasonable...

[Brisben]

Fair point, but keep in mind that the Chinese pay THE SAME for their fuel (per barrel) and diesel than we do here. What your talking about has much more to do with economies of scale, lower labour costs and the efficiencies they have over there which they have developed and nothing to do with the price of fuel.
One interesting suggestion in why fuel prices are so high is that they are being manipulated, legitimately, in order to cash into the constantly growing demand for oil and other resources in China as they grow.

Its really the TNC's and their various governments that are at fault, not the Chinese. Do they have to arrest their economic growth so you can have slightly cheaper fuel? Thats truly unreasonable...

But they pay a lot less for labour.

It is not unreasonable to allow the same growth, the problem now lies in that we were allowed to grow at our own rate, but without these carbon emissions, which we are now asking them to comply with, if the same was dictated to westerners we wouldn't have grown at the rate we did.

It is a complex issue, the basis remians that we all take advantage of the chinese growth in industrial markets, whether as buyers or consumers.

Fuel costs are irrelevant in terms of supply and demand, they sell , we buy, why?

Because they can do it for less. Your right ecomoies of scale come into force, like the volumes they buyer mean lower prices. Ie Fuel.