Cheap Oil: Too Much Of A Good Thing? | Jaya Bajpai | LinkedIn.
The 40% drop in oil prices over the past 6 months has garnered a lot of attention recently, most of it focused on the economic stimulus lower oil prices should provide the global economy, the impact on currency and fixed-income markets and the increase in economic pain suffered by exporters such as Iran and Russia. In this article, I draw on historical data to assess the potential increase in geopolitical tail risk that lower oil prices may represent. I believe this is an overlooked consequence of lower oil prices that, while low probability, would have an outsize impact on the global economy – a classic “fattening of the tail”. I look at monthly and aggregate data to smooth out daily fluctuations and avoid having us mistake the forest for the trees.
The data shows that in the 1980s, the most-cited oil price war, the average price of oil dropped from approximately $28/barrel in 1985 to a low of $11.58/barrel in July 1986 (US Energy Information Administration data for monthly average front month futures contract price). This would be analogous to a drop from $60/barrel to $25/barrel in 2014 prices, using the US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI calculator. Prices subsequently rebounded almost 60% from that July 1986 low, ranging between $16/barrel and $20/barrel for the rest of the 1980s. (There were a few months in that 4 year timespan where the average dropped below $15/barrel, but I want to focus on the big picture in this article.) Inflation-adjusted to 2014 price levels, oil prices ranged between $29/barrel and $37/barrel.
