An oil rig anchored in the Cromarty Firth, Invergordon
(Picture: PA)Here is Pierre Andurand, a hedge fund guy and oil expert, talking to the FT.
“Wakey wakey”, he said, along the way to the prediction that crude could hit $250 a barrel this year.
Since it is presently about $117 that would be quite something, a serious shock to economies that hardly need another one.
Let’s agree three things: that Mr Andurand is a clever bloke who knows much about oil trading. That he has presumably already bet on oil soaring, so his view is not an impartial one. And that he is probably wrong.
Back in 2008 as the banking crisis raged, Goldman Sachs predicted oil would spike to $200 a barrel. It never got anywhere near, hitting an all-time high of $147 on July 11 that year.
By December, Goldman’s experts, immune to normal levels of embarrassment, predicted oil would crash to $45. It did, for a bit, but was back at $80 before very long.
Oil market observers, ones not talking up their own book, like to say that the cure for high oil prices is high oil prices.
When it gets daft-expensive, we find another way. The price comes down soon enough.
And in the short-term we seem to have learnt how to live with higher oil prices.
If you are trying to fill up the tank in a Sainsbury’s carpark, that may seem like cold comfort just now.
The FT also reports that BP is poised to spend £1 billion on new electric car charging points, part of the process by which we need less oil in the first place. Its price, whatever hedge funds think, mattering less and less to you and me.
There’s good news out there, amid an admittedly awful lot of reasons not to be cheerful.
