Since before World War I and throughout the 1970s, the people who controlled oil had a lever for controlling others. Since the 1980s, the equation has shifted; oil producers have become dependent on oil consumers. Demand was always there, and then it started to vary and the political stability of oil producers also varied. Geopolitical Futures’ forecast for 2020 was that there would be a global economic slowdown, whose effects would be intensified by dynamics kicked off by the 2008 crisis. We saw the 2008 crisis as being an exporters’ crisis, in which countries dependent on exports, particularly China, had … Continue reading Oil Prices