shale | LIAM HALLIGAN

Is the oil price crash over? In mid-February, Brent crude traded at $63 a barrel, up from a $45 low a month earlier. Does that sharp rise mean oil will now climb steadily back above $100? Triple-digit oil prices, after all, have become the normal in recent years. The black stuff spiralled to almost $150 in late 2008, ahead of the global financial crisis – before falling back, as the world economy endured it worst peacetime shock for 80 years and asset markets collapsed.

As global growth returned, though, and traders remembered that the populous emerging markets were still becoming more populous, their energy demands ever rising, oil quickly recovered. During the three and a half years from early 2011 to mid-2014, oil was above $100 pretty consistently. Prices then started falling last June, by some 60% to their mid-January low. But Brent crude is now up 36% during the four weeks to the time of writing. So has the oil market now turned?
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We’re told the Federal Reserve has “ended easy money”. I’m not sure that’s true. Yes, the US Central Bank announced last Wednesday that its gargantuan money-printing habit is soon to be scaled back. Instead of creating $85bn per month ex nihilo, the Fed will from January conjure up just $75bn. That’s still a massive base money expansion of $900bn a year.

At the same time, in a move apparently meant to help cash-strapped US mortgage-payers, but actually aimed at global financial markets, Ben Bernanke bolstered his “forward guidance”. America’s benchmark interest rate is likely to stay near zero “well past the time when the jobless rate declines below 6.5pc”, the Fed Chairman told the world. So US monetary policy remains ultra-loose but is now slightly less ultra-loose than before. Maybe.