How many people own stock in an oil company?
The thing you need to understand about oil companies is they set the profits as a PERCENTAGE markup from the price of base crude. They do not mark it up a flat rate. So in other words, high oil prices actually raise the profit margin for oil companies as long as demand holds up. The problem is the prices are about to break the camels back and demand is going down, if we as a people could drop our oil consumption at any significant level, maybe the oil companies would sit up and notice.
