It rankles when you lose $20. But hey, at least it isn’t $4.4 trillion. That is roughly how much revenue the world’s oil producers will forego over the next three years, based on the current outlook for prices and demand, relative to what was expected just a year ago. With Brent crude having tumbled back below $50 a barrel, the industry has entered a vicious, and spreading, bout of deflation. A year ago, futures indicated an average Brent crude-oil price in 2016 through 2018 of about $101 a barrel. Today, that is just under $60. Estimates of future demand have also been marked down slightly. The implied hit to oil producers’ revenue is about $4.4 trillion spread across those three years. It is a crude metric that, for example, doesn’t take account of different grades of oil commanding different prices. But it does indicate the scale of the hit […]