Owen Raskovich

Have you filled up your car?

I filled up my car this week with petrol and I noticed that the prices were really low.

So they were like 40 or 50 cents below what I last filled up for just a few months ago, a few weeks ago, sorry.

So why are fuel prices so low?

That's probably a natural question too.

Well, oil prices, so oil is what makes the fuel that you put in your car.

Oil prices globally have fallen by about 40% in the last week.

And the reason that that's happened is some countries are dependent on oil production

for their economy to move forward.

So here in Australia, we dig out of the ground a lot of resources which go into the Chinese manufacturing sector.

So companies here in Australia like BHP, Fortescue, Rio Tinto, these are the types of huge companies that take the product out of the ground

ship it by massive cargo ships over to China, and the iron ore becomes steel.

And that steel then goes into railways, it goes into buildings, it goes into all different types of things.

And that's just iron ore, right?

So our country is heavily dependent on the resources sector.

But other countries are heavily dependent on oil prices.

So there are countries in the Middle East and places like Russia that depend on oil prices staying high.

And the way that that works is different to the way that the iron ore market works.

In the oil market, there's a constant state of movement in the oil market because oil is consumed and then more oil is consumed.

It's not like steel where you build a building and then that's it.