The Post-Everything Energy Market

The Post-Everything Energy Market

One of the most puzzling aspects of oil market analysis (and policy making more generally) concerns the frequent tendency to assume that short-term and transient developments represent the ‘new normal’ or a phase change. Neo-Malthusians tend to argue that permanent global starvation has set in every time there’s a bad harvest, and when an oil price spike causes demand to dip, the final peak is acclaimed to have arrived. Peak oil supply advocates repeatedly perceived an impending collapse in Saudi production whenever weak markets lead them to cut production.