It seems odd to me that one could write a few thousand words about the world's oil economy without even mentioning Canada once. Only Saudi Arabia, after all, has more proven oil reserves than Canada. Moreover, Canada, helped along by its energy wealth, is the only G8 country whose federal government is running a budget surplus (and has done so for several years now.)
Still, if you were going to take a look at the world's economy and describe how $100-a-barrel oil is affecting things from St. Petersburg to Kano, Nigeria without mentioning on the world's largest energy exporters, this piece, on the front of today's Washington Post, is not a bad place to start:
High oil prices are fueling one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history. Oil consumers are paying $4 billion to $5 billion more for crude oil every day than they did just five years ago, pumping more than $2 trillion into the coffers of oil companies and oil-producing nations this year alone …
… there is no end in sight to the redistribution of more than 1 percent of the world's gross domestic product. Earlier oil shocks generated giant shifts in wealth and pools of petrodollars, but they eventually faded and economies adjusted. This new high point in petroleum prices has arrived over four years, and many believe it will represent a new plateau even if prices drop back somewhat in coming months.
“There's never been anything like this on a sustained basis the way we've seen the last couple of years,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economics professor and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. Oil prices “are not spiking; they're just rising,” he added. [Read the rest of the story]