Sunday, January 25, 2015

"Factoring Global Demand into the Price of Oil"

We've followed -and linked to- Political Calculations for quite a few years. One of our 2009 posts prompted this response from P.C.:
Welcome to the Friday, April 24, 2009 edition of On the Moneyed Midways, where we catch you up with the best money and business-related blog posts that we found in the past week's best money and business-related blog carnivals.

It seems Climateer believes we here at Political Calculations are "quirky." Here's Climateer's dilemma:
Political Calculations is quirky. On the one hand they link to Prof. Shiller's merged Cowles/S&P data (first rate scholarship/database). On the other they do a "On the Moneyed Midways" linkfest that seems aimed at a totally different target audience.
As it happens, we do have two very different, but somewhat overlapping audiences, which we discovered long before we first launched OMM. There's the (mostly) serious core crowd who enjoy the analytical power we bring to a number of different topics, and then there's the (more fun-loving) community of money and business-focused bloggers with whom we interact in other forums.... 
Here's some of that analytical power on display: 
Brent Crude Oil Price Projections - 1987-2040 - Source: AEO2014 EARLY RELEASE OVERVIEW, http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/er/early_prices.cfm
How much of a change in global oil prices can be attributed to changes in the relative demand for oil? And how much might be attributed to changes in the relative supply of oil?

Those are questions that we've asked and answered before, but now, for the first time, we can finally quantify the extent to which either of these economic factors may be driving the price!

We can do that math now thanks to the work of James Hamilton, who built a model of how much world oil prices change in response to changes in the prices of other commodities - ones that are particularly sensitive to changes in the demand for them: copper, U.S. dollars, and 10-Year Constant Maturity U.S. Treasuries.

Our tool below is built to do that math, with the default values being the values recorded for the week of 4 July 2014 (for the "Previous Values" and for the week of 12 December 2014 (for the "Current Values"), which Hamilton recommends because they smooth out some of the big swings in values that are recorded in the day-to-day data....MORE
HT to professor Hamilton and his post "What’s driving the price of oil down?":
In December I provided some simple calculations of the extent to which a slowdown in the growth of global oil demand may have contributed to the spectacular drop in oil prices since last summer, and I updated those estimates two weeks ago. Some of you have suggested that as conditions keep changing, perhaps I should update those calculations every week. Thanks to the always-helpful Ironman at Political Calculations, I can now go that a step better, and provide eager Econbrowser readers a quick tool they can use to update these calculations on their own on a daily basis, if your heart so desires....MORE