As many of you already know, Comcast has gone through with a deal to purchase NBC Universal. As part of the deal, Comcast will own NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, The Weather Channel, USA Network, E!, and a host of other cable channels. It would also own NBC owned stations in New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas, Chicago, and Miami.

The merger doesn’t stop at TV either. It also extends to the movies where NBC has owned Universal Pictures and Focus Pictures.

You also can’t forget the internet entities that it owns such as Hulu.

With all that entertainment real estate you can expect Comcast to begin raising rates for everyone. Not only that, but for everyone who really enjoyed Hulu service for free, it will likely be something that will disappear completely in the future, not the service but the *free* part.

Another thing that will likely happen as Comcast will own so many channels, when the company sells the content to the cable stations, it will likely bundle certain “in demand” channels with other channels that aren’t so “in demand” and will charge much higher prices. The only thing that anyone can do is basically deal with it. It happened in the 1990’s when rules regarding media ownership were relaxed and the big media groups (such as NBC/Universal) began buying up all these stations. When one company (and as large as this one is, it is sure to happen) begins raising rates, then all the others follow.

Comcast already has an unfortunate reputation as a company that isn’t consumer friendly and overcharges for content. Not only that, but all their service sectors have extremely poor reviews all across the internet.

Hopefully things won’t get too bad after the merger is complete. However, that is an extremely optimistic view due to the way Comcast already runs its business.

A disruption in the refinery of crude oil into gasoline due to a fire in a Los Angeles area refinery couldn’t even raise the price of oil and gasoline. For the first time in two months the price of a gallon of gas has fallen below $2.50 on average. Where I live, I just paid $2.38 for a gallon of regular 87 octane.

The fire at the Tesoro refinery in LA will probably effect the price of gas in California, but not too much anywhere else. The refinery processed around 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day and produced gasoline, jet fuel, and other products.

Demand for gasoline is so low that according to analyst and trader Stephen Schork, “a material disruption to supply to one of the largest markets in the world barely registered with speculators on the NYMEX.”

Wholesale gasoline for October actually increased 1.2 cents to $1.6323 per gallon today while benchmark crude for November delivery increased nearly 50 cents to $66.51 per barrel, this is after increasing 13 cents on Friday.

Prices have actually been increasing ever since Iran announced that it had a secret nuclear program at the G20 summit last week. This is due to the fact that 20 percent of the crude oil in the world is trafficked through the Straits of Hormuz which is on the southern coast of Iran. If something were to actually happen between the United States (or any country) and Iran, that route would be compromised  and oil would likely spike.

Of course, oil is one of the indicators of the economy. There are so many indicators and this is definitely one of them. After all, it’s oil that took a dive when people started realizing how bad the economy was last year. Oil also has started creeping back up and analysts are saying that other things are creeping up as well; such as the sale of homes and autos.

While it would be a good thing to not have to see oil reach the outrageous prices it hit last summer, I really want the economy to start picking up soon. Perhaps when it comes time for Chris and I to leave our college town, I’ll be able to land a real marketing job somewhere.

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While December and January are still the highest drops in online job listings so far this recession (at just over 500,000 postings), February was a modest 6,600 and March jumped back up to 100,000 fewer job postings.

The March decline reported by the non-profit Conference Board follows a modest dip of 6,600 ads in February, but is well below the record drops of 507,000 and 506,000 in December and January. Online job ads have declined over 25 percent since November.

“The March numbers indicate that we are not at the bottom of the employment cycle but that the declines in labor demand may be slowing,” Gad Levanon, senior economist at The Conference Board, said this week in a news release. “The next two months, April and May, are when employers typically ratchet up their spring hiring.”

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