I'll tell a story about when I worked in the oil industry, and let everyone here decide if it was a case of greed or not.
I worked for a very old local oil company at the time. We purchased our fuel products from a number of the refineries in the Carson area, including Exxon, Mobil, Shell, pretty much anybody except ARCO. I had refinery cards for every refinery in the Long Beach and Paramount areas, from the smallest to the largest.
I was working the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait. And shit went crazy. The lines at the refineries were hours long, as everyone wanted to grab fuel at the cheapest they could get it. Within a couple of hours wholesale prices were up 10 cents a gallon and climbing. So of course we filled every storage tank we had as well as every single truck in the fleet. By the next morning prices had surged even higher.
Of course retail prices went up, way up. But the thing is, all that fuel was really purchased at much lower prices, it would be some time before the cost increase was really felt at the refineries. So millions and millions of gallons of fuel were sold at a greatly increased profit. What a windfall for the oil companies, both large and small. All this because one oil producing country was in turmoil.
Another thing to consider is how all the prices at all the refineries were raised at the same times and the same amounts. Do the words collusion and price fixing mean anything to anyone? I actually thought that was illegal, but what do I know?
Maybe it wasn't greed that drove that, but if it wasn't I'm not sure what it was.