{"id":466927,"date":"2026-03-10T01:19:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T01:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/466927\/"},"modified":"2026-03-10T01:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T01:19:08","slug":"why-the-price-of-oil-matters-more-than-you-might-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/466927\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the price of oil matters more than you might think"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">What the shock means, for now, is higher energy prices.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Brent crude and the US benchmark, West Texas Intermediate, have both surged since the war began, approaching $120 per barrel at one point on Monday, before falling back to just under $85 per barrel. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">That is feeding through to costs faced by businesses and households. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In the UK and Europe, natural gas prices have almost doubled since before the war in Iran began.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Even in the US, which as a major oil and gas producer tends to relatively shielded from global price fluctuations, prices at the pump are approaching $3.50 per gallon, up from roughly $2.90 a month ago, back to levels last seen in 2024.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Last week, Goldman Sachs estimated that a temporary rise in oil prices just to $100 per barrel could knock 0.4 percentage points off of global economic growth. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">But if the conflict is not resolved by the end of the month, analysts say that it could push global oil prices above the recent 2022 peaks seen after Russia&#8217;s invasion of Ukraine, with a chance of oil hitting $150 per barrel in some scenarios.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Kornfeind said that the knock-on impact for the economy would be &#8220;pretty drastic&#8221; at that point, as higher costs force households and businesses to reduce other spending and the wider economy slows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What the shock means, for now, is higher energy prices. Brent crude and the US benchmark, West Texas&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":466928,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-466927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}