OBELA Analysis

The crisis over COVID-19 has hit the world economy as a whole. This note reviews the effects on the oil industry, the fall in the volume of world supply and demand, and the prices of crude oil quoted on international markets.

After the collapse of the oil price, a recovery in the energy sector will depend on the improvement in the price and the speed with which it is achieved. Prices are expected to remain low, and the sector is expected to suffer despite the market recovery.

In view of this negative environment in the industry, the possibility of greater investment in alternative energies and consequently a deepening of the change in the energy matrix must be envisaged.

The economic crisis that accompanies the COVID19 and its health crisis have generated stock market collapses that had never been seen before. The decline has been more marked than that which occurred between 1929-31 and deeper.

Between February 25 and March 23, the financial markets had lost more than 30% of the value of their assets and the outlook was worse. The immediate solution was to inject the financial system in the United States, which was reproduced by the ECB and the Bank of England.

On the contrary, the US economy has accumulated, since February 2020, more than 27 million jobs lost, the highest in its history. The question of the rescue of the stock markets in the face of uncontrollable unemployment raises the question of the importance of the financial sector for decision-makers and policy makers.

Since December 31, 2019 the world has gone from predictions of declining economic growth/recession to being faced with the first global economic contraction since the 1930s.

Never before in peacetime has a country closed its factories and not shipped its finished products. This time manufacturing and foreign trade were frozen in China. Nor had it ever been seen that all services in all countries, some more than others, closed simultaneously, except for the United States, Great Britain and Mexico which closed later or did not close at all.

The contemporary societal lesson will be to have new forms of human contact, new forms of life. Global value chains must be rethought and industrialization policies must be rethought. Public health as a public good must return.