John T. Harvey — Why gas prices are rising…again!

...the short story is this: the above law, because it allowed financial market participants to treat oil futures as just another investment like Wal-Mart or Exxon stock, caused gas prices to become tightly linked to stock market prices. This means that every time the stock market rises, oil and gas prices get pulled up, too, and vice versa. There is no logical reason for this! Gas prices should adjust because of a change in the forces driving the underlying supply of or demand for oil, not because stock prices are at a historic high....

This needs to be fixed! The prices of goods and services should be determined by the actual forces of supply and demand in their market. This allows consumers and producers to make rational, informed decisions. But linking gas prices so directly to stock market prices makes no more sense than linking the prices of hamburgers or movie theater tickets to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Until this link is broken, we will all see significant changes in our cost of living every time financial markets revalue stocks.  

Forbes — Pragmatic Economics
Why gas prices are rising…again!
John T. Harvey | Professor of Economics, Texas Christian University

The price of oil and gas is directly related to price level through supply side inflation, i.e., price rise of vital resources due to shortage, real or artificial. See Federal deficit spending doesn’t cause inflation; oil does by Rodger Malcolm Mitchell at Monetary Sovereignty.