Oil prices collapse: assessing the ‘known unknowns’

Predicting the future for oil prices is a losing game due to the complexity of the market. But some pieces of critical information are often widely missed, argues Vincent Kaminski, including several potential risks to firms associated with North American exploration and production

Vincent Kaminski

The history of commodity markets is littered with exceptionally poor forecasts of oil prices, including one bad forecast of my own. I should have known better and remembered where Italian poet Dante Alighieri placed the diviners, astrologers and others with enough audacity to attempt predictions of the future: in the eighth circle of hell, with their heads turned backwards and tears flowing down