Oil prices are spiking?
Really?
I am 57 years old. Just over half a century. Long enough to have watched the Cold War, both Gulf Wars, September 11, financial crises, regional wars and more geopolitical convulsions than I care to count.
I have also watched oil climb to almost USD 150 a barrel.
That was in 2008, more than fifteen years ago, just as the global economy was heading into one of the most severe financial crises in modern history.
And here is the part that seems to have been forgotten: USD 150 in 2008 is roughly USD 220 today.
Yes, there is an inflation monster.
The money in our pockets is worth considerably less than it was fifteen years ago. Apparently, we have to rediscover this fact every time a headline announces that something has become expensive.
Now consider the world we are looking at.
We are facing a convergence of wars and crises without an obvious equivalent in my lifetime. One of the world’s three major oil producers is watching oil fields and refineries come under drone attack. The most important oil- and gas-exporting region on Earth is facing unprecedented disruption, closures and uncertainty in maritime traffic, with ships unable to pass through routes on which global energy supply depends.
And that is only part of the picture.
There is conflict burning in multiple places. Infrastructure is being attacked. Trade routes are becoming less reliable. Strategic chokepoints are suddenly strategic again. The geopolitical environment is becoming steadily more hostile while the global economy is already carrying enormous amounts of debt, distortion and accumulated weakness.
So what does the oil price do?
It hovers around USD 100.
It tickles that number and, for a moment, threatens to take it seriously.
And we call this a price spike.
What has happened to us?
I want to see USD 250 before I start using words like truly expensive.
Because under the circumstances, this is remarkably little.
That is not necessarily reassuring.
Quite the opposite.
If the world can absorb this level of geopolitical disruption, attacks on production infrastructure and uncertainty around critical shipping routes without oil exploding into genuinely extraordinary territory, perhaps the most interesting story is not what is happening to oil.
It is what is happening to demand.
A commodity does not exist in isolation. Prices are the collision point between supply and demand, and the relatively muted response of oil prices may be telling us something deeply uncomfortable about the condition of the global economy.
Perhaps demand is simply weaker than we want to admit.
Perhaps industrial activity is weaker.
Perhaps the supposedly resilient global economy is considerably less resilient beneath the surface.
So yes, oil is expensive.
But a hundred dollars a barrel, against this geopolitical backdrop, is not the terrifying number some headlines would have us believe.
It may instead be a warning of a different kind.
The world is burning.
And the oil price barely flinches.
That should worry us far more than the headline number.
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/09/08/rapidan-energys-bob-mcnally-on-why-oil-prices-are-spiking.html