Goldman's Oil Guru: The $50 Barrel Is Right on Time
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Less than a week into 2015, and already oil is down 9 percent for the year. Oil prices fell below $50 a barrel on Monday for the first time since April 2009. By Tuesday, oil traded below $48. It wasn’t that long ago that analysts were gasping at the prospect of $70 oil, a threshold oil moguls and petrostates would be relieved to be anywhere near by the end of 2015. Breaking through $60 was seen by a lot of well-paid people as a likely floor. But that was three weeks and $12 ago.
I was in Houston the day oil first fell below $60, at a Chamber of Commerce lunch heralding the strength of the local economy—40 percent of which is based on oil. Despite the Texas-size grins, you could sense the panic starting to creep in.