When gas prices rose 150 percent from June 2020 to June 2023, politicians and the media didn’t hesitate to blame corporate greed. The evidence they offered was two-fold: rising prices and rising profits.

Yet over the past six months, gas prices have fallen 33 percent. Are politicians and media congratulating oil companies for displaying altruism? No. Market skeptics seem only to see prices through the eyes of greed. When prices go up, it must be greed on the part of the oil companies. And when they come down, it must be “market forces” that are outside the control of the oil companies. There’s a perverse symmetry here, because politicians hold themselves to the same lopsided standard, though in the other direction. To hear them tell it, falling prices are due to politicians’ sage governance, while rising prices are due to “market forces.”

Consider ExxonMobil, the fourth-largest oil company in the world and the largest US oil company. For the five years from 2010 through 2014, ExxonMobil’s after-tax profit averaged $9.1 billion per quarter. For the five years from 2015 through 2019, its profits fell more than 50 percent, to an average of $3.9 billion per quarter. Then came COVID. In 2020, ExxonMobil lost an average of $5.6 billion per quarter. 

From 2015 to 2019, when the oil company’s profits were down by more than half, no politician thanked ExxonMobil for its generosity. And in 2020, when ExxonMobil lost a total of $22.4 billion, no politician pointed out the company’s utterly selfless magnanimity.

And politicians were right not to do so.

ExxonMobil was neither generous in the latter 2010s, nor magnanimous in 2020, it was simply responding to market forces. It was doing what we all do: paying the prices that markets dictate, and selling at prices that markets allow.