单选题
Oil prices, an economic scourge in decades past, have soared to record levels in recent years. But the fallout often seemed negligible: Americans kept spending; employment kept growing; factories, construction crews and retail stores stayed busy.
Now, however, the economy may be starting to sputter as damage from the weak housing market drags down growth. If payrolls drop significantly, will high-price crude oil begin to cause pain in a way that it hasn"t in nearly three decades?
Many economists do not think so, maintaining that if the United States entered a recession, the price of oil would quickly drop.
"The United States is the single largest oil-consuming nation in the world," said Stephen P. A. Brown, director of energy economics at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. "A slowdown here ought to bring the price of oil down."
That view is by no means unanimous. The global economy has been growing rapidly, and oil consumption overseas keeps rising. A few economists say it is possible that even if the American economy weakens, demand abroad will be strong enough to keep oil prices high.
"Our relative importance in the global markets is diminishing," said Larry Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation in New York. "An American economic slowdown", he said, "won"t have a visible impact on high oil demand and it won"t have a visible impact on high oil prices."
If that view proves to be right, the United States could conceivably find itself in a situation reminiscent of the 1970s, with weak economic growth and high-price oil taking a double bite out of consumers" pocketbooks.
The situation is murky in part because there is little historical precedent for understanding today"s oil market. Less than a decade ago, oil fell below $11 a barrel. Oil at $50 was a distant prospect, and the prevailing wisdom was that a run-up of that extent would do serious economic damage.
But as the global economy boomed, oil blew past $50 late in 2004, then past $60 in mid- 2005. Many Americans complained about the rising price of gasoline, but the economy shrugged off pump prices that would exceed $3 a gallon, and kept growing.
On Sept. 20, crude oil for next-month delivery settled at a record price of $83.32 a barrel and has stayed above $80 most days since, ending yesterday at $81.44, up $1.50 from Wednesday. (Adjusted for inflation, the record high for oil was nearly $102 a barrel early in 1980, after the Iranian revolution, but that price level did not last long.)
Part of the reason that costly oil has not done too much damage, it seems clear, is that the economy has become less sensitive to energy prices than it was in the 1970s.