Updated -- Crude Oil: Comparing Price Trends Across Ten Currencies

By Paul Kedrosky · Tuesday, November 27, 2007 ·

Here is what happens when you leave Paul alone on a plane with laptop, and historical currency and crude oil data: You get a giant longitudinal comparison of recent crude oil price trends across ten major currencies.

In essence, I normalize everything to four years ago, all the while converting to the U.S. dollar using the then exchange rate to the currency in question. The result: You see how current crude price increases are, in part, an artifact of the collapsing U.S. dollar.

Here is the four-year figure (click on it for a larger version):

oil-four-year

And here is the one-year trend broken out (click on it for a larger version):

oil-one-year

[Update] An earlier version of this post had a fairly nasty underlying spreadsheet error.

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