The Reuters-Michigan survey of consumer sentiment registered a decline from 77.5 in February to a preliminary reading of 68.2 in March. That’s the biggest monthly decline since the financial crisis in October 2008, and wipes out the nice gains of the last four months to put us back where we were in October 2010.
Category Archives: energy
What will Saudi Arabia do?
One key question in determining the impact of instability in Libya and elsewhere on world oil markets is how much other countries can and will increase production to offset the shortfall. Here I review the critical role of Saudi Arabia in past disruptions and discuss the current situation.
Libya, oil prices, and the economic outlook
What will be the economic effects of this week’s developments in Libya? We have a fair amount of historical experience from which to try to answer that question.
Brent-WTI spread
Lots of action in oil prices today, as the unrest has spread from Tunisia and Egypt– which produce relatively modest amounts of crude oil— to Libya, the country sandwiched between them, and producer of over 2% of the world’s crude oil supply. Rather than try to guess where those developments are going to lead, I wanted today to try to make sense of another equally striking development in oil markets over the last 6 weeks– the disparity between the price of oil in the Midwest United States and that elsewhere in the world.
Saudi oil reserves may be overstated by 40%
Stuart Staniford calls attention to this story from the Guardian:
The U.S. fears that Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.
The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom’s crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels– nearly 40%.
Stuart also notes that in his own independent forensic analysis conducted in May 2007 (to which we called the attention of Econbrowser readers at the time), he estimated that remaining reserves in Ghawar (by far the Saudis’ biggest and most important oil field) were overstated by 40%.
An improving economic outlook
Looking a little better each day.
Geopolitical unrest and world oil markets
Change is on the way in the Arab world, with Egypt the latest focal point. Here I review recent events and their implications for world oil markets.
How much are gasoline prices weighing on consumers?
On Friday Reuters reported:
Rising gasoline prices beat down U.S. consumer sentiment in early January, overshadowing an improved job outlook and passage of temporary federal tax breaks, a survey released on Friday showed. A year-end surge in gasoline prices ratcheted up consumer inflation expectations to their highest in more than two years, according to the latest data from Thomson Reuters and the University of Michigan. The surveys’ preliminary January reading on the overall consumer sentiment slipped to 72.7, below 74.5 in December. It fell short of a 75.4 reading predicted by economists polled recently by Reuters.
Oil shocks and economic recessions
I’ve just completed a new research paper that surveys the history of the oil industry with a particular focus on the events associated with significant changes in the price of oil. Here I report the paper’s summary of oil market disruptions and economic downturns since the Second World War. Every recession (with one exception) was preceded by an increase in oil prices, and every oil market disruption (with one exception) was followed by an economic recession.
The first oil shock
A research paper by Eyal Dvir of Boston College and Ken Rogoff of Harvard suggests some interesting parallels between the recent behavior of oil prices and what was observed at the very beginning of the industry. I’ve been doing some related research on the history of the oil industry that looks into the events behind historical oil price shocks. Here I describe the first oil shock, which occurred a century and a half ago.