US President Trump says oil companies are making too much money; "i don't like it"

• Reiterates call for oil companies to cut the retail price. 
• Exxon and Chevron are making too much money. 

Presidential jawboning of the integrated majors is a recurring feature of high gasoline price episodes and has historically produced more noise than mechanism: past rounds of this kind of rhetoric, aimed at pump prices or at windfall earnings, have tended to move the large integrated names briefly at the open before fading when no policy follow-through materialises. The actors and their form are established: Exxon and Chevron have been targets of this critique on prior occasions and have typically responded with production and capex discipline arguments rather than price concessions. The distinction worth drawing is between rhetorical pressure and the policy channels that could actually bind: a windfall profits tax, export restrictions on crude or products, or SPR and lease administration. Historically the first is politically difficult, the second has surfaced in past debates without being enacted, and the third is administrative and incremental. Crude itself tends to trade the policy risk rather than the comment, since export curbs would distort the WTI-Brent differential and product cracks rather than the flat price in a simple direction. The follow-ons that matter are whether the rhetoric is paired with an agency action, a formal proposal, or a congressional sponsor, and whether it recurs as gasoline prices approach politically sensitive levels ahead of an electoral calendar.