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Sunday, January 24, 2016

'Can Lower Oil Prices Cause a Recession?'

Jim Hamilton:

Can lower oil prices cause a recession?: ...A drop in oil prices means less money in the hands of oil producers but more money in the hands of oil consumers. Currently the U.S. is importing about 5.1 million barrels a day more than we’re exporting of crude oil and petroleum products. At $100 a barrel, that had been a net drain on the U.S. economy of $190 billion each year. That drain that will now be cut by more than half by falling oil prices.
We usually see consumers spend their extra income right away, whereas it takes more time for producers to alter their spending plans. As a result, even if the U.S. was not a net importer of oil, we might still expect to see a short-run positive stimulus from dropping oil prices. ... The conclusion I draw ... is that each consumer spent more than they would have if oil prices had not fallen, but that there were other macro headwinds at the same time that were offsetting some of the positive stimulus of falling oil prices.
In any case, we’ve now had plenty of time for cuts in spending by U.S. oil producers to start to have an economic effect of their own. If there’s an increase in spending by consumers of $1 and a decrease in spending by producers of $1, it’s not really a net wash for the economy. The reason is that the consumers are spending their money in different places and on different items than the producers are cutting. There is a lot of specialized labor and capital that’s involved in oil extraction that can’t move costlessly to some other sector when the oil patch goes sour. ...
And of course we’re talking here not just about the people who work in the oil industry itself but all the other industries and services that sell to the oil sector and more in turn who sell to these suppliers. ...
There are thus some reasons why a decrease in oil prices would be a boost to the U.S. economy and other reasons why it could even be a drag. A number of studies have looked at the effects of oil price decreases and concluded that these have little or no net positive effect on U.S. real GDP growth...

    Posted by on Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 12:03 AM in Economics, Oil | Permalink  Comments (17)


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