I'm curious what the financial engineering you're referring to was.

I've been trying to understand why gas is still comparatively cheap given the war and the best I've landed on so far is that the spread between feedstock (crude oil) and output (diesel, gas, jet fuel, etc) widened in large part die to flooding the market with strategic oil reserves.

We keep crude prices low, which is what many indicators track, while we couldn't keep final product prices low as easily because we can't quickly increase refinery capacity.

How did they financially suppress fuel prices?