Short term oil will move with the dollar/market/risk/bots.. Long term oil has no option but to move up, even if we move over to NAT GAS, the rest of the world doesn't have that luxury. The big problem happens when its spikes and hypothetical demand destruction doesn't bring it back down.
At current prices, we're looking at a roughly $1T drag on the economy relative to the mid-90s. If "something" is happening overseas that results in regionalized demand destruction while overall demand stays strong, that is going to cause really big problems in those regions. Really, really big problems. Like "put a million troops in Iraq and stick straws in the sand" kind of problems.
Ding ding ding ding +1 for Jackie Treehorn Also, I just want to add - discussions and reasoning asides, it all comes down to how much we make in our trades. We can say anything, argue about reasons behind such and such (which usually gets revealed after the facts anyway) but it all comes down to how much $$$ we can make in that trade and save it. Let's get some more trade ideas. This one has been well-timed and I've been watching the patterns on the US$ and other stuff... Let's move on to the next target - US treasury. I don't think it's toppy yet despite the so many people wanting to short it. There's still a good 20% upside on 30yr T. TLT can go up another 20% just looking at some patterns there. That, I believe, will be the last hurrah.
There are many states today which suffers oil crisis. The importation of oil had been affected of the wars in Middle East which is one of the big sources of oil all over the world.