A Crude Predicament

The Era of Volatile Oil Prices

For most Americans, from the late 1970s until just a few years ago, following the price of gasoline was like riding the Disney World attraction It's a Small World: a shifting but gentle, basically unremarkable experience. But over the past few years, it has felt more like Space Mountain -- unpredictable, scary, and gut-wrenchingly uneven. Between January 2007 and July 2008, the price of a barrel of oil rose from $50 to more than $140; by the end of 2008, it had crashed to just over $30; less than a year later, it had breached $80 again. In early 2011, on the back of strong global demand and the political turmoil in the Middle East, oil sold for over $120 a barrel. Today, as prices continue to swing wildly, most Americans are wondering how they got on this ride and how to get off.

Over recent years, Americans have grown accustomed to considerably higher oil prices than those of the 1980s and 1990s. But they have not yet come to terms with sustained swings in global crude oil prices. High prices are easy enough to explain. Voracious demand in emerging economies is colliding with constraints on production. Old oil fields are producing less, and new fields are more expensive to develop. Governments with access to cheaper resources have restricted investment in new supplies, for various reasons. Faced with popular discontent, petrostates in the Middle East and North Africa, for example, are spending their oil revenues on trying to placate their burgeoning populations with subsidized food, gasoline, and other necessities.

The volatility of oil prices requires a different explanation. Textbook economics says that prices rise and fall in order to balance supply and demand. In the oil market, however, supply and demand are extremely slow to respond to price shifts, which means that prices can undergo big swings before a balance is restored. Oil is a must-have commodity with no exact substitutes; when prices rise, most consumers have little choice in the near term but to pay more rather than buy less. It takes years to develop new resources, and it is difficult to turn production on or off on short notice. When new supplies (usually years in the making) threaten to flood the market or a sudden drop in demand (for example, due to a recession) leaves sellers without ready buyers, prices can plunge before producers start shutting the taps. Oil prices naturally tend toward extremes...

This is a preview of a premium article. You must subscribe [1] to access the full text. If you are already a subscriber, please log in here [2].