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Whither, Oil?

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There is little more important to the US economy than the price of oil. In the last year, about $500B of gasoline alone was sold at gas stations across the nation, with another $180B in other fuel oil – about 3.9% of total GDP.

Despite its importance, no one is willing to predict where the price of oil will be in the future. The Economist said “If your correspondent could forecast that, he would be on a yacht reading The Economist rather than at a desk writing for it.” Indeed. It seems like a task for an idiot to even try, as Barataria has several times in the last year. We were so wrong about it that it might make sense to bet heavily in the opposite direction.

Low oil prices appear to be here to stay, at least through the year. The implications are worth talking about, even if we can’t be sure what happens after that.

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The Expectations Game

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Investment is a tricky thing. You put up a lot of money in the expectation that you’ll have a small return year over year. Currently, the expected rate of return is historically small in the developed world, on the order of a few percent. It has to be weighed against the risk that the initial investment will never be paid back, winding up in default.

The slowdown in the global economy is not actually a decline in output all over the world, but a pause in the rate of growth. It wasn’t expected, either, which is the real problem. The developed world is largely stagnant, save some hope in the US for better times ahead. The developing world need to catch up, but appears to be taking a breather after a tremendous run.

As we consider the next few years and the potential for a genuine boom ahead, it is becoming clearer that we aren’t ready for anything more than muddling through until there is a reckoning and a realization of how the next economy will work – for everyone. That will take some patience and public investment all over the world.

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A Slippery Commodity

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Oil is the most traded and shipped commodity in the world, amounting to a total of 90M bbl per day total production – 33B bbl per year or nearly $1.5T even at today’s low price. There is nothing more critical to a developed or developing economy than to keep things moving, which is to say this vast ocean of oil is critical to the economy as we know it today.

You’d think with such a steady supply and critical demand that the price would naturally stabilize according to the natural laws of supply and demand. Apparently, oil greased its way through that semester of economics.

Where will the price of oil go from the decades-long low of $45 per bbl that it is today? The short answer is that no one knows. The long answer is that anyone who hasn’t been cashed out of the game is betting that it has to go higher, but no one know when or how high.

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Lowdown Oil

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The story of today is the price of oil. A month ago it looked as though it couldn’t go any lower as US wells were pegged to a production price of about $80 per barrel. Now, it’s at $60 per barrel. There are signs that many US wells will indeed keep operating as improvements in efficiency and a lower operating cost once the sunk costs once well is started leave room for more profit even at this low price. Cheap oil may be here to stay longer than we thought.

But with that, we still have the problems in Russia. The Ruble has fallen off a cliff, a problem often blamed on the price of oil. It’s deeper than that, and the flailing Russian response has in some ways made things worse. The currency has lost about 60% of its value in one year, versus about 40% for oil.

That’s not to say there aren’t threats as well as opportunities in the US beyond oil itself. Cheap oil changes a lot of games, and is worth thinking through.

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Crude and Junky

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As oil prices remain low, the benefit for US consumers is obvious. But for oil companies? In the short run, prices running at about the cost of production mean no profits for the year, but in the longer run there is a terrible problem ahead.

That’s because the start-up of so many fracking operations across the US came at a cost, and that cost was financed primarily through junk bonds – high yield securities that demand a hefty interest payment to keep the operation going.

Zero profit means more than hard times – it means default and, in all likelihood, a shut down of many wells. That might not only spike up the price of oil, it is big enough to trigger a huge financial problem.

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