El Estado, no los especuladores. Según el economista sueco Stefan Karlson:
The boom is primarily driven by structural long- or medium-term factors. Demand is growing rapidly because of the rise of China and fast growth in other emerging economies. Meanwhile, while global oil production is actually growing, growth is inhibited in the short term both because of various political factors that stop drilling and because of the fact that even where such political obstacles does not exist, it takes several years to actually extract the oil. Brazil has recently found vast new oil reserves, and no political obstacles exist there to prevent drilling, yet it will be several more years before that oil reaches the world market.
These political factors differ somewhat in their form, but none of them seems likely to go away anytime soon. In Nigeria, as was previously stated, constant attacks against oil facilities are holding down production there, and these attacks looks unlikely to cease. In countries like Venezuela, Mexico and Russia, hostility against foreign investments combined with governments and bureaucrats starving government run oil companies of competence and cash, means that potential oil production is held back. And in the United States, opposition to drilling for environmentalist reasons, mainly by Democrats, prevents increases in oil production.
Another factor that in the short term has contributed to the sharp increase in the price of oil is the Fed’s inflationary monetary policies. Because the price of oil is much more flexible than most other prices and it is immediately affected by, for example, exchange rate effects, the short-term effect of an inflationary monetary policy is much greater than the short-term effect on the more sticky prices of regular goods in the supermarkets. That the oil price increased so much after the Fed started its aggressive interest rate cuts was not really a coincidence.
¿Qué puede hacerse para que bajen los precios?
The long-term solution is to reduce or abolish taxation on oil production and to abolish all regulatory restrictions (whether motivated for environmentalist reasons as in the U.S. or nationalist reasons as in Mexico) on oil drilling. Opponents of drilling often reply to this that it won’t provide any short-term relief. But while that is true, but there won’t be any short-term relief without drilling either and the point of drilling is to provide long-term relief. Moreover, their preferred solution of having the government invest in research to invent more so-called renewable sources of energy is likely to take even longer to provide relief (if it ever provides relief).
To provide short-term relief, different solutions are needed. This means, for example, that the U.S. government should start releasing the oil held in the so-called Strategic Petroleum Reserve, while the Fed should stop its inflationary policies.
En cualquier caso Karlson no confía en que estas reformas políticas vayan a aplicarse.
Sobre este tema también podéis leer este artículo de Jerry Taylor en el New York Post, o ver la entrevista a Robert Murphy en Fox News, disponible aquí (el segundo vídeo).
Juan Ramón Rallo acusaba a la Reserva Federal de ser en buena medida el responsable de los altos precios del petróleo, al precipitar una burbuja con su política de bajos tipos de interés:
La depreciación progresiva del dólar que ha instado la Reserva Federal (y que ha acelerado durante el último año) ha provocado que los inversores institucionales (que tradicionalmente se concentraban en bonos de inversión y acciones de blue chips) liquiden sus posiciones en estos sectores (debido a que no son capaces de protegerles de la inflación) y se coloquen en el de las materias primas como depósito de valor (de ahí que consuman liquidez y no les importe el precio al que entran).
Fank Shostak ahonda en esta tesis.
