Volatility Of Oil Prices

As OPEC has loosened its grip over the past ten years, the oil market has been rocked by wild price swings, the likes of which haven't been seen for eight decades. Crafting an engrossing journey from the gushing Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1860s to today's fraught and fractious Middle East, Crude Volatility explains how past periods of stability and volatility in oil prices help us understand the new boom-bust era. Oil's notorious volatility has always been considered a scourge afflicting not only the oil industry but also the broader economy and geopolitical landscape; Robert McNally makes sense of how oil became so central to our world and why it is subject to such extreme price fluctuations. Tracing a history marked by conflict, intrigue, and extreme uncertainty, McNally shows how—even from the oil industry's first years—wild and harmful price volatility prompted industry leaders and officials to undertake extraordinary efforts to stabilize oil prices by controlling production. Herculean market interventions—first, by Rockefeller's Standard Oil, then, by U.S. state regulators in partnership with major international oil companies, and, finally, by OPEC—succeeded to varying degrees in taming the beast. McNally, a veteran oil market and policy expert, explains the consequences of the ebbing of OPEC's power, debunking myths and offering recommendations—including mistakes to avoid—as we confront the unwelcome return of boom and bust oil prices.

This paper examines the behavior of crude oil prices since 1980, and in particular the volatility of these prices. The empirical analysis covers “spot” prices for one of the key internationally traded crudes, namely Dated Brent Blend. A GARCH (generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic) model, which allows the conditional variance to be time-variant, is estimated for the period which includes the oil price slump of 1986 and the surge in prices in 1990 as a result of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The paper also discusses the growth of futures and derivative markets and the dynamic links between spot and futures markets.

How much does speculation contribute to oil price volatility? We revisit this contentious question by estimating a sign-restricted structural vector autoregression (SVAR). First, using a simple storage model, we show that revisions to expectations regarding oil market fundamentals and the effect of mispricing in oil derivative markets can be observationally equivalent in a SVAR model of the world oil market à la Kilian and Murphy (2013), since both imply a positive co-movement of oil prices and inventories. Second, we impose additional restrictions on the set of admissible models embodying the assumption that the impact from noise trading shocks in oil derivative markets is temporary. Our additional restrictions effectively put a bound on the contribution of speculation to short-term oil price volatility (lying between 3 and 22 percent). This estimated short-run impact is smaller than that of flow demand shocks but possibly larger than that of flow supply shocks.

The theories of investment under uncertainty and real options predict that uncertainty about, for example, oil prices will tend to depress current investment. We reinvestigate the relationship between the price of oil and investment, focusing on the role of uncertainty about oil prices. We find that volatility in oil prices has had a negative and statistically significant effect on several measures of investment, durables consumption and aggregate output. We also find that accounting for the effects of oil price volatility tends to exacerbate the negative dynamic response of economic activity to a negative oil price shock, while dampening the response to a positive oil price shock.

This book examines the dynamic relationship and volatility spillovers between crude oil prices, exchange rates and stock markets of emerging economies. Unfortunately very little research has been conducted to analyze the volatility spillovers and dynamic relationship between crude oil prices, exchange rates and stock markets of India.

This paper examines the relationship between monetary policy and oil prices within a world oil demand and supply model. Low price and high income elasticities of demand and rigid supply explain high price volatilities and producers' market power. Exchange and interest rates do influence oil market equilibrium. The relationship between oil prices and interest rates is a two-way relationship that depends on the type of oil shock. During a supply shock, rising oil prices caused interest rates to increase; whereas during a demand shock, falling interest rates caused oil prices to rise. Record low interest rates led to high oil price volatility in 2005. Data shows that world economic growth and price stability require stable oil markets and therefore more prudent monetary policies.

This book is an attempt to capture the future impact and implications of the recent oil price increase. The recent scenario of rising oil prices is explained in terms of huge demand for oil, particularly in order to raise the strategic oil reserves by Chi

Crude oil prices have been on a run-up spree in recent years. Their dynamics were characterized by high volatility, high intensity jumps, and strong upward drift, indicating that oil markets were constantly out-of-equilibrium. An explanation of the oil price process in terms of the underlying fundamentals of oil markets and world economy was provided, viewing pressure on oil prices mainly as a result of rigid crude oil supply and an expanding world demand for crude oil. A change in the oil price process parameters would require a change in the underlying fundamentals. Market expectations, extracted from call and put option prices, anticipated no change, in the short term, in the underlying fundamentals. Markets expected oil prices to remain volatile and jumpy, and with higher probabilities, to rise, rather than fall, above the expected mean.