Bloomberg Businessweek (North America)

On the issue of oil’s price swings, is it just supply and demand?

-

At its simplest, it is. What’s not told is that demand rises relatively predictabl­y over time, but supply comes online in big chunks. The industry does many long-lead projects. And if you get supply and demand a little bit off as you’re building that new capacity, you can get big excursions up and down in price. And that’s what we saw recently. Over the last five years, we had production that went offline in the Middle East. So prices went up. Then we got it a little bit off as the economy slowed down and Saudi Arabia and Iran returned supplies to production.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Canada