Bloggy Business Today

Rex Tillerson holds two positions in the Exxon Mobil Company. The first one is the Chairman position and the second one is that of the company CEO. Tillerson inherited the second role from Lee Raymond when the latter individual decided to retire and ever since that point Tillerson has held both of these top level executive positions, much to the chagrin of a large number of investors within the company.

At the annual investors meeting, a motion was introduced to force Tillerson to resign from the position of Chairman, introducing to take his place someone that could be considered an independent director. A similar motion was introduced last year, getting 40% of the vote and failing to pass. The same motion this year gained around 39% of the vote, failing to reach the previous benchmark even in spite of strong support for the motion by the Rockefeller family.

It seems as if the status quo is what investors in Exxon can expect to continue to see for some time to come, although with the record profits that the company has been raking in for the past couple of years, it is perhaps not a surprise that Rockefeller’s descendants failed as many investors are wary of rocking the boat during economic uncertainty. The don’t fix something that isn’t broken mentality is pervasive at the moment, which means that Tillerson will likely hold onto both positions for some time to come.

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Just a few months after President Bush scoffed at the idea of $4 for a gallon of gasoline, that day arrived and it arrived sooner than many analysts had predicted. But, as the morning of Friday dawned, it was quite clear that the $4 mark had been easily reached by many of the gasoline companies around. The price jumped from $3.94 the previous evening to $4.19 and while there was a difference of a few cents over or under at some stations, it was quite obvious that the latter figure was the one that the gas stations would be going for that day.

So, where does this leave us in the present circumstance? The answer is actually that nothing much has changed. It’s not like $4 gasoline is a surprise to anyone (even the President, incidentally enough, who quickly took back his words in a press conference that followed the one where he famously proclaimed ignorance of $4 gasoline projections), least of all the financial world that seems so dependent on the price of that one commodity. While $4 is definitely a benchmark, at this stage it is little more than that as most people in the know believe that gasoline prices will be going up much more in the coming weeks, months and years.

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