{"id":30430,"date":"2018-02-01T10:18:20","date_gmt":"2018-02-01T15:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=30430"},"modified":"2018-02-01T10:46:14","modified_gmt":"2018-02-01T15:46:14","slug":"the-abnormality-of-oil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=30430","title":{"rendered":"The Abnormality of Oil"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Oil<\/picture>Ahmad Al-Rubaye\/Getty Image<\/span><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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The Abnormality of Oil<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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At the 2017 Abu Dhabi Petroleum Exhibition and Conference, the consensus among industry executives was that oil prices will still be around $60 per barrel in November 2018. But there is evidence to suggest that the uptick in global growth and developments in Saudi Arabia will push the price as high as $80 in the meantime.<\/section>\n
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LONDON \u2013 Writing about oil prices is always risky. In a January 2015, I suggested<\/a> that oil prices would not continue to fall, and even predicted that they would \u201cfinish the year higher than they were when it began.\u201d I was wrong then; but I might not be wrong for much longer.<\/p>\n

I recently spoke at the massive Abu Dhabi Petroleum Exhibition and Conference (ADIPEC), which is a kind of Davos for oil-market participants. While there, I caught the tail end of a discussion among senior oil executives who all agreed that at this time next year, crude oil will still be around $60 per barrel, as it is today.<\/p>\n

I was about to be interviewed by the CNBC reporter Steve Sedgwick, to whom I said, \u201cThat would be a first. Oil prices hardly moving in a year?\u201d Needless to say, Sedgwick began the interview by telling the audience what I had said, and quizzed me on why I disagreed with the others.<\/p>\n

Before I get to my explanation, let me state the usual caveats. Forecasting oil prices is inevitably a fraught endeavor; in fact, it makes forecasting currency markets look easy. When I completed a doctorate on oil markets in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I had already concluded that trying to guess oil prices is a waste of time and energy. Later, when I was at Goldman Sachs, I was often amused to see commodity analysts in my research group struggling to cope with the usual chaos of oil-price developments.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ahmad Al-Rubaye\/Getty Image The Abnormality of Oil At the 2017 Abu Dhabi Petroleum Exhibition and Conference, the consensus among industry executives was that oil prices will still be around $60 per barrel in November 2018. But there is evidence to suggest that the uptick in global growth and developments in Saudi Arabia will push the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1357,18288,588,1729,594,8402,701],"class_list":["post-30430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-global-growth","tag-jim-oneill","tag-oil","tag-oil-and-gas-industry","tag-oil-prices","tag-project-syndicate","tag-saudi-arabia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30430"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30434,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30430\/revisions\/30434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}