Just as the economic growth rates of countries with flexible currencies to some extent are self-moderating, since their exchange rates will partly rise and fall according to their relative strength or weakness, so the global economy has some kind of unspoken regulator of its own, in oil prices.
Though it might be too much to describe them as an automatic stabilizer, it's a fairly clear phenomenon that, subject to supply shocks or other constraints or manipulations, oil will lead and respond to trends in world economic demand, and act effectively to either check or support growth.
Evidently, oil prices are not freely set in the same way that demand and supply govern levels and direction in the foreign exchange markets, owing most noticeably to the decisions of Opec, but there is some kind of parallel.
Indeed, Opec itself may aim to control oil prices for the sake of compressing cycles, though not so much as a matter of benefaction as simply trying to ensure that revenue is maximised over time by not crushing demand, alienating customers, or encouraging alternative energy forms.
The tragedy unfolding in Europe is, incidentally, not only testament to the perils of denying the market mechanism of national currency realignments (though that's a necessary rather than sufficient condition for economic recovery) but obviously regrettable too from a global perspective, linking as it does back to the rate of activity and so oil prices, recently suffering in sympathy.
Indeed it's an unfortunate fact that the inability of governments to allow or enable sustainable economic growth through stable money and structural reform, rather than contrive one artificial stimulus after another, will be an impediment to world growth for years to come.
Oil prices are likely to remain volatile amid the deep uncertainties of uncharted economic, financial and political territory.
The international fallout of previously rapid growth based on cheap money rather than on productive transformation has descended with a suffocating vengeance, and the signs are of global slowdown again.
With the West trapped by its errors, and the East's behemoths China and India also succumbing to policy misguidedness, the fortunes of oil and its providers in the Gulf are at the behest of ill winds these days.
The good news is that falling prices themselves could herald the next upturn, as real income is released to importing countries. The bad news for exporting countries is their own declining income in direct counterpart, at least in the short term until some kind of compensating multiplier takes effect among consuming countries.
It could be, though, that a natural equilibrium price between the world's boom and bust conditions is below the $100 that producers might prefer.
Research by Samba has indicated that breakeven budget figures for the GCC states have escalated in recent years, to something over $70 and approaching $80 per barrel in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Thus, it is not only the rest of the world whose sensitivity has grown to the price of oil.
At the same time, the mechanisms whereby oil prices feed back to the global economy are mixed.
For instance, higher oil prices may lead to higher inflation, but arguably only if they are complemented by looser monetary policy designed to offset the impact to growth and to smooth adjustment. Otherwise they simply constitute a redistribution of wealth from consumers to producers, until that effect itself promotes lower prices again.
In that sense, ironically, high oil prices can be said actually to lead to lower interest rates either way, in prompt or delayed reaction, with or without the intervention of higher rates in between. Economic reasoning can become very convoluted like that, even in relatively settled times.
Movements in the oil price may be expected to have even greater impact in an environment which is so financially frail and lacking in confidence as right now.
As Bassam Fattouh found in a 2007 discussion paper for SOAS, London, “demand and supply determine the oil price in the long term, but they do so in a specific context”, namely of global geopolitical and market conditions. What happens to the oil price is not mechanistic according to a consistent model.
Events seem already to have overtaken the IMF's concerns in its April outlook, namely of tension in the Gulf over Iran, and the upside risk associated with limited spare capacity and inventory buffers in the system.
With Saudi Arabia having responded to market tightness with a reported production surge, and Europe proceeding wilfully towards a steep cliff and perhaps unsavoury unknown, it's the downside that threatens.
Let's just hope, bearing in mind that matters may get worse before they get better, that the world economy's balancing tool, its unofficial and unorthodox ‘black gold' standard, will play some part in a rescue, but also that the Gulf manages well the sharp softening in its receipts in the meantime.
