Gas prices drop more than $1 per gallon in past year
Average gasoline prices in Chattanooga fell below $3 a gallon last week for the first time in two months, leaving fuel prices down by more than a dollar a gallon from where they were a year ago.
Among 170 Chattanooga gas stations surveyed by the online gas reporting service GasBuddy.com, the average price of regular gas locally fell by 9.8 cents a gallon last week to $2.94 a gallon. After three weeks of decline, gas prices in Chattanooga at the start of this week were down by nearly 36 cents a gallon from where they were a month ago and stand $1.03.1 per gallon less than a year ago.
The national average price of diesel has fallen 6.3 cents in the last week and stands at $4.01 per gallon.
Chattanooga gas prices, on average, started this week 56 cents a gallon below the national average even after the U.S. average price of gas fell by 7.5 cents a gallon in the past week.
“Americans are spending hundreds of millions less on fuel every week compared to a year ago, and that’s a number that could rise further as prices are poised to continue trending lower this week,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, said in a report Monday.
California regulators slow to see loan risk
California’s bank regulator said Monday that it was too slow to see the growing risks at Silicon Valley Bank and did not act forcefully enough to get the bank to fix its problems.
A report from the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation echoed similar findings in a Federal Reserve report looking at its own supervision of Silicon Valley Bank. The Fed was highly critical of its own role in the bank’s failure, saying its supervisors were also too slow or too unwilling to press the bank’s management to address issues.
Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and failed on March 10 after its depositors rushed to withdraw tens of billions of dollars from the bank in a 21st century bank run. Aftershocks from the bank’s failure have shaken the financial system, leading to the failure of Signature Bank and First Republic Bank, and putting several other banks under severe financial strain.
Facebook may scrap news content in Canada
Meta Platforms Inc. said it would end news content on Facebook and Instagram in Canada if lawmakers pass legislation to force social-networking platforms to pay media publishers to feature their work.
“We’ve taken the difficult decision that if this flawed legislation is passed, we will have to end the availability of news content on Facebook and Instagram in Canada,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said in a statement on Monday.
Clegg described Canada’s proposed Online News Act as “fundamentally flawed,” saying Canada would become the “first democracy to put a price on free links to web pages, which flies in the face of global norms.”
The former UK deputy prime minister had been scheduled to speak about the bill at a committee of Canada’s House of Commons on Monday. But he canceled after the title of the session was changed to, “Tech Giants’ Current and Ongoing Use of Intimidation and Subversion Tactics to Evade Regulation in Canada and Across the World.”
Canada’s act, known as Bill C-18, was proposed to establish a “fair revenue sharing” system between digital platforms and news outlets and provide for collective bargaining by media in negotiating fees with companies like Meta. In introducing the legislation last year, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said he was seeking to address a “market imbalance” as an increasing number of Canadians turn to digital platforms for news.
— Compiled by Dave Flessner