How high could the oil price go? | The Economist

    The price of oil has shot up past $126 dollars a barrel, its highest level since 2022. After months of shrugging off concern, markets are finally starting to reflect that the Strait of Hormuz might remain closed, taking about a seventh of the worldโ€™s oil supply offline. The Economistโ€™s editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Edward Carr, deputy editor, and a panel of experts discuss how high the oil price could really go.

    #oil #iran #straitofhormuz #economy #finance

    00:00 – How high does the oil price need to go to balance supply and demand?
    00:50 – Why has the oil price surged?
    01:28 – Are traders in la la land?
    03:12 – What has stopped the price from rising?

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    40 Comments

    1. The real story isn't just the price per barrel, but the 'demand destruction' threshold. Weโ€™ve seen this movie beforeโ€”once oil crosses that $110-120 mark, the global economy starts tapping the brakes. The question isn't how high it can go, but how long it can stay there before a recession forced by energy costs brings it crashing down again.

    2. One key factor that is overlooked is that global oil demand was only growing at .6% a year before the strait was closed. At a time when spare capacity is at a record 7%. In 1973 global oil demand was growing at 7% a year and spare capacity was at 1%. The traders on the global oil market understand the actual numbers the talking heads are way, way off the mark.

    3. I also think something most of the world doesnโ€™t understand is that the disruption of oil hadnโ€™t really reached the end market yet. It takes weeks for ships to reach their destinations from the Gulf, so the rise in prices was all about future supply. Now weโ€™re reaching the point where the markets are going to see less oil arriving and the reserves that have been released will be quickly used up. So from now on unless reserves are released in larger quantities the price is going to rise until it slows demand or the strait opens.

    4. We aren't in a totally crazy world. The world and the Pentagon have been planning for a closed strait for fifty years. Massive reserves, bypass pipelines, and diversified supplies all ensure that there is no crisis from a closed strait.

    5. The US president doesnโ€™t know what to do about a war he started and said oil prices could be high at least until the midterms. His next priority will be riding around the golf course tomorrow and has no concern whatsoever about what average Americans are going through.

    6. All of this fear mongering and hand wringing over a 4% shortfall? Hello, the world can easily get by with 96% of normal oil supply without causing a crisis. Why would anyone believe otherwise?

    7. Zanny acting like her support of Israel had no influence on this. Israel bombed Iran and kicked this whole thing off. The economist full throated pro-Israel bias hasnโ€™t helped.

    8. Some genius commented! โ€œNo crisis?โ€

      You blind, bro? Or dense? Or paid troll trying to sway public opinion in the comments box.

      There are slight mitigating factors, such as you mentioned, but are insignificant to the total effects of a blocked strait.
      Oil ainโ€™t the only resource not passing through.
      Aluminum and fertilizer, just two.
      I encourage you to reevaluate your position.

    9. This is basically what Chris Martenson is saying – getting towards $200-$300 a barrel to balance out supply and demand. This coming by the fall.

    10. We're sick and tired of hearing trumpeys cheap "deal". You don't make a " deal" between something so important between countries. None of this would be happening if trumpy hadn't started bombing iran.

    11. Alfin llega alguien a ablar algo interesante jijiji el trage es gris o blanco e mel.cholt. o jit vamos aka de olograma.jajaja chaรญto…..

    12. Basing ANYTHING on Donald Trump is like basing things on your cat or dog; You really never have a 100% what they'll do or why they'll do it.

    13. Because Americans elected and incompetent and ignorant president the whole world is suffering and being dragged down. Every country should seek compensation from America

    14. These numbers of reduced barrels don't do the crises justice. About half the global oil is used in the counties of origin, and it's not able to be sold on the international markets due to geography and lack of infrastructure. So the reduction in saleable oil on the international markets is a much larger fraction.

    15. ๋ฏธ๊ตญ์‚ฐ ์›์œ  ๊ณต๊ธ‰๋Ÿ‰์ด ๋น ๋ฅด๊ฒŒ ์ฆ๊ฐ€ํ•  ๊ฒ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๋ž˜์„œ ๋งˆ๋ƒฅ ์œ ๊ฐ€๊ฐ€ ์˜ค๋ฅด๊ธฐ๋งŒ ํ•˜์ง€๋Š” ์•Š์„ ๊ฒ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.
      ํ•œ๊ตญ์—์„œ๋Š” ์ผ๋ถ€ ์„์œ ํ™”ํ•™ ๊ณต์žฅ์ด ๊ฐ€๋™์„ ์ค‘์ง€ํ•˜๊ธฐ๋„ ํ•˜๋ฉด์„œ ์ƒ์—…์  ์›์œ  ์ˆ˜์š”๊ฐ€ ์ค„์–ด ๋“ค๊ธฐ ์‹œ์ž‘ํ•˜๊ธฐ๋„ ํ•ด์„œ ์ผ์ • ์‹œ๊ฐ„ํ›„์—๋Š” ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ์ด ์•ˆ์ •๋  ๊ฒ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋Œ€์‹  ๊ฒฝ๊ธฐ ์นจ์ฒด, ๊ณ ์šฉ ์•…ํ™”๋Š” ํ”ผํ•  ์ˆ˜ ์—†์ง€ ์•Š์„๊นŒ ์‹ถ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

    16. As long as he stays in office it will only get worse and worse. Even more so if he starts really losing as sociopaths get really destructive if they lose.

    17. What revisions will the 2026 Economist Democracy Index have in store as to the state of the United States. Will they support the Global Command economy and leave the US unchanged? Me thinks they kowtow to the Paedo in Chief.

    18. When the price of oil becomes exorbitantly high our European friends can replace the expensive oil by dropping their trousers and lighting their farts. Problem solved.

    19. Oh yeah… I can totally see reasonable entities like Israel, Iran, and Donald Trump working something out quickly. Makes sense to price in lower oil because of the level headedness of all involved. I'm actually surprised it isn't at $70 by this point considering Israel's storied history of being a peaceful actor who would never take irrational, illegal military actions; Iran's wonderful track record of not over reacting in response to outside forces trying to wrestle the grip of power from the IRGC; and America's role as a beacon of freedom whose defense and oil industries totally don't benefit from a forever war that also has competent, measured leadership who are totally not the type to write 200 word tweets at 3 in the morning because of a joke a late night host made. /sarc

    20. What a fancy way to reveal absolutely nothing of interest. I guess the useful information is behind a paywall.

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