Oil continued to remain strong with prices moving slightly higher this morning, ahead of today's weekly inventory report. The main reason for prices remaining strong continues to be worries over oil supplies.

Traders have pushed prices through the $142 mark this morning, with the precious crude trading as high as $142.45, but have cooled off a bit and are now sitting at $141.06, which is $0.09 higher on the day. As Douglas McIntyre discussed earlier, typically such high oil prices are expected to put a crimp in demand, but this time around that may not be the case at all. Already many analysts are stating that demand may not fall too much, even with the record high gasoline prices.

We should get a slightly clearer picture on just how true that is later today when the Department of Energy releases the weekly inventory numbers. Last week inventories increased, but that is expected to reverse this week, and analysts are predicting this week's oil inventory numbers to actually show a decline of around 1.2 million barrels (compared with a 800,000 barrel increase that was reported last week).

Gasoline stockpiles are also expected to be lower. Analysts are expecting a drop of a half million barrels, a steeper drop than the 100,000 decline in last week's report.

It would be interesting to see what sort of data we get in today's report, but don't expect any meaningful long-term adjustment coming out of today's numbers. While demand in America is always going to be on the minds of traders, it is the rising demand in developing economies such as India and China that is really stoking supply fears, and those fears are not going to go away any time soon.

Add on top of the supply fears all of the constant worries about more trouble erupting in the Middle East, especially Iran, and you have the recipe for sustained high oil prices for some time to come. It would be hard to imagine anything can slow down this oil market in the months to come.

How are the high gasoline prices effecting you? Have you been forced to adjust your holiday plans to stay closer to home, or are you going about your holiday travel as normal? Let me know exactly how the current situation is effecting you, and what prices you are seeing when you go to put gasoline in your cars.

Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the online investment advisory service Investor's Observer.