Oil
The commodity that reorganised the twentieth century and prices most of the rest of them.
The invention
The problem. Whale oil was running out and lamps still needed fuel.
Edwin Drake drilled the first commercial well looking for lamp fuel. Gasoline was initially a waste product, dumped in rivers. Within seventy years the waste product had become the most strategically important substance on earth — a useful reminder that the value of a thing is a function of what else exists.
Oil derrick, Lima, O.
1905 · Library of Congress · Public domain
Where it has failed
Not a list of disasters. A pattern library.
- 1973Global
The oil embargo
OPEC's embargo quadrupled prices, triggering inflation, rationing, and a decade of stagflation.
A single input can propagate into every price at once. Energy is not one category in a budget; it is inside all of them.
- 1986Global
The counter-shock
Saudi Arabia abandoned price defence and oil fell from $30 to under $10, bankrupting producers and contributing to the Soviet collapse.
Producers are as exposed as consumers, in the opposite direction. Every price has two victims.
- 2020New York
Negative prices
The May 2020 WTI contract settled at minus $37 — holders paid to have oil taken away, because storage was full.
A price can go below zero when the thing is physical and holding it costs money. Models assuming positivity broke.
Where it stands today
You now have the shape. Here is the reading.
Live from public data, pulled at request time. Read it with the failures above in mind — not because a repeat is due, but because knowing the mechanism is what lets you recognise one early.
Retail gasoline, all grades
U.S. Energy Information Administration
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U.S. Energy Information Administration
In your ledger
Fuel is one of the few macro series with a same-month effect on a household ledger, which is why it is modeled here as quasi-fixed.
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