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The China bubble fuelling record oil prices

By Daniel Gros
Friday, July 18, 2008

Whatis behind the ever- increasing price of crude oil? Most economists and energy experts argue that even the current sky-high price is justified by fundamentals, namely the high growth in demand by emerging markets, in short "China". The one important fact usually adduced to support this position is that supply and demand seem finely balanced as inventories are not increasing.

原油价格不断上涨的原因是什么？大多数经济学家和能源专家认为，从基本面因素，也就是从新兴市场（简言之，就是"中国"）需求的高速增长来看，即便是目前的这种天价也是合理的。通常被援引以支持上述论点的一个重要事实，是供需似乎相当均衡，因为库存并没有在上升。

But this argument is wrong. The observation that inventories are not increasing is irrelevant since there is a very convenient way to store oil that is not measured by inventories data: just leave it in the ground!

但是，这个论点是错误的。库存没有上升与此并不相关，因为有一种非常便利的贮油方式，没有被计入存货数据：那就是让石油留在地底下。

Many experts also stress the observation that, in spite of very high prices, production has not really increased (last year, for example, saw an increase of only 1 per cent). However, this argument, like the one about inventories, is wrong because it does not take into account the nature of oil as an exhaustible resource.

The big choice for any owner of an exhaustible resource, such as King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, is only inter-temporal: extract today or extract tomorrow. If the king extracts today, he gets today's price (minus the extraction cost). If he extracts tomorrow, he will get tomorrow's price (minus the same extraction costs), discounted at today's interest rate. The supply of oil today will thus increase only if tomorrow's price is low relative to the price today.

对于任何可耗尽资源的所有者--例如沙特的阿卜杜拉国王(King Abdullah)--来说，重要的选择只是个时间问题：今天开采还是明天开采。如果国王决定今天开采，他得到的是今天的价格（减去开采成本）。如果他决定明天开采，他将得到明天的价格（减去同样的开采成本），按照今天的利率贴现。因此，只有当明天的价格相对低于今天的价格时，今天的石油供应量才会增加。

In other words, the supply of oil will increase not when the price today is high, but only if suppliers expect that prices will be lower in future. This implies that China influences oil prices today not so much because Chinese demand is high today (China currently accounts for less than 10 per cent of global consumption of crude), but because demand in China is projected to increase so much in the future, fuelling expectations of higher prices and thus leading producers to lower their rate of extraction today. In this light, it is no mystery that oil supply has not reacted to higher prices. Rational oil producers are just waiting for even higher prices tomorrow.

换言之，石油供应不会因为现在的价格高而增加，而只有在供应商预期未来价格会更低时才会增加。这意味着，中国对目前油价的影响，不是因为中国目前的需求高（中国现在的原油消费量不到世界总消费量的10%），而是因为，人们预计中国未来需求将大幅上升，这助长了油价上涨的预期，从而导致主要产油国放慢了目前的开采速度。在这种情况下，就不难理解为何石油供应没有对高油价作出反应了。理性的产油国不过是在等待未来更高的价格。

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