Ken Wattret
speaker
312 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 11 Jul
Ken Wattret’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
That's a really good question.
I if we focus on the percentage increase in crude oil prices over the month following the start of the conflict in the Middle East in late February, we're talking about an unusually large increase.
So for Brent crude specifically, the monthly increase was over forty percent.
And that magnitude of increase has been exceeded only twice over the history of the series going back to the nineteen eighties.
The first time was in August 1990, at the time of the first Gulf War, and the second was in May 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now that second episode was a little different in the sense that crude oil prices were rebounding following a sharp drop when the pandemic
initially arrived.
In percentage terms, the rise in spring twenty twenty was quite large, but in dollar terms it was comparatively small, as the level of prices was rather low at the time because of the pandemic.
The bottom line is that the rise in March this year was very large, and that reflects the significance of a conflict in the region to global energy supplies.
I think there are a few issues to consider here.
There's the potential for short-term volatility in commodity prices, including oil in this instance, during periods of very high geopolitical uncertainty.
Now we know crude prices jumped in March, but if the conflict in the Middle East had come to a relatively swift conclusion and prices came down quite quickly, the macroeconomic
consequences would have been relatively short-lived and moderate.
Now, in this instance, of course, that hasn't been the case.
The elevation of crude oil prices has continued because the disruptions to production and supply have continued.
And the concern that we're increasingly hearing from our colleagues in S P Global Energy is that even if the current ceasefire holds and an agreement to end the conflict is achieved, it's still going to take some time for production and supply conditions to normalise and that means prices will remain high for quite some time.
And it's that duration of the shock that really matters when we think in
About the economic consequences.
Now another issue that we need to consider is the distinction between nominal and real oil prices.
Measured in real terms, the recent rise in crude oil prices, though large, is somewhat smaller than some of those we've seen during past oil shocks.
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