What if the world never again sees sustained prices for oil over $100 per barrel? What if—absent exogenous black-swan events like major wars—oil never sells for much more than $50 per barrel for decades into the future? Who wins? Who loses? Short answer: The winners are consumers everywhere, and American businesses that produce oil. The losers are nations that are oil monocultures, and businesses or policies everywhere anchored in expensive oil. Is such a scenario likely? Or is the current price collapse a kind of inverse bubble? History is often meaningfully predictive. In the roughly 150-year history of oil prices there have been just three short periods where oil sold for over $50 per barrel (measured in inflation-adjusted terms). It happened first for about 20 years after 1860 at the dawn of the oil age, followed by nearly a century with oil cycling around $20. The second price bubble, […]