Until a decade ago, most of the world was a captive customer of oil—consumers would pay any price for gasoline and oil demand was soaring regardless of the surging oil prices. But recently, many countries around the world have started to show more sensitivity to oil prices—oil demand grows as their economies grow, but oil demand is also more susceptible to oil price swings, with the oil price-consumption correlation behaving more like an everyday product, according to data by Washington-based ClearView Energy Partners and research by Bloomberg Gadfly columnist Liam Denning. Although it’s at least a decade or more too early to call the end of the world’s oil addiction, the research and data suggest that in a growing number of large oil-consuming economies oil demand now correlates negatively with oil prices. In other words, consumption drops when prices rise and vice versa—a common economic concept applicable to almost […]