Oil's more distant future

THE credible forecast of $US200 oil and the latest trade figures provided an important and instructive footnote to the Reserve Bank’s formal abandonment of the ‘Rory clause’.

Apart from, that’s the oil price forecast, carrying an ominous but confusingly complicated message on petrol prices – fortunately, five years or more into the future.

If correct, such an oil price could signal the price at the pump going up a cool $1 a litre. Or should that be ‘hot?’

Except then again, it might not. It would all depend on what had happened to our dollar. Because that sort of oil price could send our dollar racing through parity with the greenback, muting the petrol price rise.

Just as $US147 oil last year sent our dollar almost to parity against a much (at the time, seemingly) sounder greenback. The one before all those multi-trillion dollar US budget deficits.

Herald Sun