The total debt of the oil and gas sector globally stands at roughly $2.5 trillion, two and a half times what it was at the end of 2006. The recent fall in the oil price represents a significant decline in the value of assets backing this debt, introducing a new element to price developments. In common with other episodes of retrenchment induced by rapid declines in asset values, greater leverag...

The study investigates the effect of macroeconomic determinants on the performance of the Indian Stock Market using monthly data over the period January 1991 to December 2011 for eight macroeconomic variables, namely, Interest Rate, Inflation, Exchange Rate, Index of Industrial Production, Money Supply, Gold Price, Silver Price & Oil Price, and two stock market indices namely Sensex and S&P CNX...

The futures market in West Texas Intermediate crude oil was introduced in 1983 with a posted-price cash market in which the posted price changed a few times a year. By 2002, the cash price changed almost daily. Evidence from producers’ invoices shows that this initially low frequency of price changes reflects transactions prices. Using experiments, we show that the introduction of a futures mar...

According to the standard analysis of commodity prices, stockpiling is a necessary signature of speculation. This paper develops an approach suggesting that speculation may temporarily push crude oil prices above the level justified by physical-market fundamentals, without necessarily resulting in a significant increase in oil inventories. Looking beyond debate on the value of oil-demand price-...

The relationship between oil price shocks and U.S. macroeconomic fluctuations advocated by Hamilton (1983) broke down in the 1980s amidst a new regime of highly volatile oil price movements. Several authors have argued that asymmetric and nonlinear transformations of oil prices restore that relationship, and thus that the economy responds asymmetrically and nonlinearly to oil price shocks. In t...

We propose a new time series model aimed at forecasting crude oil prices. The proposed specification is an unobserved components model with an asymmetric cyclical component. The asymmetric cycle is defined as a sine-cosine wave where the frequency of the cycle depends on past oil price observations. We show that oil price forecasts improve significantly when this asymmetry is explicitly modelled.

This paper investigated the reaction of aggregate commodity market to oil price shocks and also explored the effects of oil price shocks on China's fundamental industries: metals, petrochemicals, grains and oilfats. We separated the volatilities of oil price into expected, unexpected and negatively expected categories to identify how oil prices influence bulk commodity markets. We contrasted th...