Here is the validation of the demand model that we produced in early March. The unleaded demand is consistently running slightly over the model, and the distillate demand, with the exception of the week-to-week variability that we noticed in this data because of the variability in weather that causes some fluctuation in the five year averages, is pretty close to on-track.

Since these two models were developed based strictly on the seasonality, I think we can deduce from this that the demand for unleaded is actually about 91 tbpd greater than the seasonality suggests, so maybe the economy is a little stronger than we suspect. I have also adjusted my distillate model to smooth out some of the variability and assume that the demand will decrease roughly linearly between now and June....

So I agree with Geithner, that the economy is improving a little bit, but the depression conditions in the trucking industry are still continuing..... as evidenced by weak distillates demand.