Oil Prices - Summary of 4 hours of news bits in past month

I did not knew oil prices had crossed $4 mark and got a huge surprise to see that last Thursday. I don’t watch news generally because much of it is irrelevant but after we have set up PC to our TV it’s much easier to see exactly what matters. So I was just watching series of MSNBC videos going all the way up to May on oil prices going up, people leaving their RVs behind, people trying to sell out their SUVs, GM planning to dump Hummer, people choosing to do home barbeque instead of traveling for memorial day… There is a new term called Staycation for people staying home for vacation (we heard another term “Junctober” to refer to colder windier October like weather in June at our visit to Vason island)! a big dose for me of all of that. However the most worrisome part was airlines cutting down 25% of the seats and tickets sky rocketing 2X to 4X. So I looked up SEA to SLC and fortunately Utah ticket is only gone up by $75 ($225 to $295). Yes, big increase but its not like $600 - yet. It would be painful to think of Utah drifting away from the reach. On the other note, gas prices in Europe and elsewhere is about $8 so it’s not very unrealistic that US prices will match up to that in not very long term. However all indications are that if oil prices goes above $5 there will be a crash in economy because lot of businesses are currently trying to swallow this increase in one way or another and with continuous rise all of them will finally dump it on customers.