Crude oil rocketed more than $10 a barrel Friday to a record high of $138.54, snuffing out motorists' hopes that gasoline prices might ease soon.
"It's like every time I look at the prices, they have jumped another 10 cents a gallon," groused James Freedner, 57, of Sun Valley. "I just don't know when this is going to stop."
The biggest one-day surge ever in crude prices was fueled by a mix of factors, including a gloomy U.S. job report and interest-rate fears that drove down the dollar, unease in the oil-rich Middle East and a prediction by a major brokerage firm that crude could hit $150 a barrel by July 4.
"Never before seen, unprecedented, amazing, epic, all those fit to describe today's [trading] session for crude oil and refined products," Denton Cinquegrana of the Oil Price Information Service wrote in a report to clients late Friday.
The $10.75-a-barrel jump at the New York Mercantile Exchange followed Thursday's increase of $5.49 and is expected to flow through quickly to the gas pump.
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