FTC to monitor gas prices more closely

WASHINGTON (CNNfn) -- The Federal Trade Commission said Thursday it's launching a broad new monitoring program to gather data on gasoline prices.

An FTC official said hearings held last fall and work by commission staff since then led the agency to conclude it needed to monitor gas prices around the country more closely.

Although the FTC has carried out several gas price studies, the new program will be so much larger in scope and detail that it is "essentially a new policy," the official said.

The official stressed that some monitoring is already in place.

The FTC in recent years has conducted several investigations into gasoline pricing practices in the California and Midwest markets and concluded each time that there was no collusion among suppliers or violation of antitrust laws.

FTC Chairman Timothy J. Muris said the FTC's new statistical model will identify and monitor "unusual" gasoline price movements in 360 cities across the country.

This model "will allow FTC staff to identify and track gasoline price spikes on a 'real-time' basis and to identify as quickly as possible the contributing factors," Muris said in a statement.

Though the FTC has investigated price fluctuations on the West Coast and in a number of Midwestern states, "we have broadened our focus ... to analyze in a more comprehensive way the central factors that can affect the level and volatility of refined petroleum product prices throughout the United States."

Gas prices barely budged during the past two weeks, dipping just 0.36 cents to $1.42.11, a national survey said Sunday.

The national average is about 30 cents less than what Americans were paying a year ago, according to Trilby Lundberg, whose Lundberg Survey of more than 7,000 gas stations around the country was carried out May 3.