Yet the lion's share of oil-price weakness is a by-product of an increasingly shaky global economy.
But after the oil-price crash in the mid-1980s, life for most of the young became grim.
Goldman Sachs thinks that Asian growth will bear the brunt of the oil-price rise.
It is concerned about the impact of the oil-price shock on the supply side of the economy.
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An oil-price hike might quickly bring share prices back down to earth, with more severe consequences for growth.
The precise impact of the recent oil-price rise will depend greatly on how long oil prices stay high.
The oil-price spike has been magnified by the dollar?s decline against other currencies.
And we realized that big oil-price run-up was based largely on speculation anyway.
For Gulf oil producers, boom times are back, with a fury unseen since the oil-price shocks of the 1970s.
That is partly because annual oil-price inflation is running at 17%, compared with 100% at its peak in 2008.
But it is certain, as opposed to merely likely, that the recent oil-price hike is a substantial negative supply shock.
In the 1991 Gulf war, the conflict was over swiftly and the oil-price spike short-lived, so the markets soon recovered.
During the oil-price boom of 2008 they did not even cover the cost of the fuel burned in Indonesia's power stations.
Some think the oil-price spike of 2008 was partly caused by China stockpiling diesel and other fuels in advance of the Olympics.
The 2008 oil-price spike and 2009 policy shifts all helped too.
Since the 2002 Treaty of Moscow, Russia has skillfully used global oil-price increases to upgrade and modernize its warhead stockpiles and delivery systems.
Concerns over the surging cost of Brent crude are growing as analysts warn that Europe could be at the center of an oil-price shock.
When they turned rough, as amid the debris of the Sukarno era, or during the oil-price slump of 1983-86, technocratic common sense has prevailed.
The nuclear efforts date back 20 years, predating the oil-price rise.
Also, big economies today are generally better insulated from oil-price fluctuations.
Despite the oil-price surge, the government is deeply in the red.
President Bush could help to once and for all pop the oil-price bubble by selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on a more regular basis.
Elsewhere in our spring Investment Guide we offer the wisdom of Yale professor Robert Shiller on how to insulate yourself from oil-price unpleasantness ( Click here for more).
Unlike many rivals, which often focus on short-term results and oil-price movements, Exxon invests in or walks away from projects based on long-term returns on capital assuming moderate oil prices.
Lawrence Summers, America's treasury secretary, attracted attention recently when he likened the new-technology boom to a positive supply-side shock, the converse of the oil-price shocks of the 1970s.
In February the Juba government cut off the oil in protest at high transit fees, depriving both countries of revenue they desperately need and helping to cause a global oil-price spike.
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Despite paying initial lip-service to the need to counteract the debilitating oil-price cycle by saving money during the boom years, he has virtually emptied the fund set up in 1998 for that purpose.
Ben Jacobsen, a finance professor at Massey University in New Zealand, has another theory: it takes investors (like economists) a while to work out the impact of oil-price movements on the economy generally.
The boom has all the standard features of an oil-price shock, except that, compared with the more familiar cases of 1973-74 and 1979-80, and the not-so-noticed case of 1990-91, this one happened in reverse.
But the Asian producers started making more SUVs and pickup trucks in their North American factories to escape the duties, and then a rising oil-price led many motorists to abandon these often gas-guzzling vehicles.
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