It has to be confusing to analyse and forecast the oil market these days. Even those who are well informed enough to have a handle on supply capabilities and trends must surely have trouble assessing and predicting demand.

Given the perennial inaccuracy of economists’ forecasts for growth, it must be doubly difficult to estimate what is likely to be the real and sustainable call upon output, and what is merely a temporary impetus in money terms, boosted by the artificial liquidity surges of Western central banks.

And that’s without properly considering the extra degree of volatility that the monetary injections are responsible for, by inducing speculative behaviour unrelated to the ongoing physical need of the global economy.

There have already been regulatory investigations into that unwelcome dimension of oil and other commodity price spikes, and the issue may well be revived if the phenomenon returns to have savage effects on the dissemination of food, especially, in the developing world.

Now that the global financial crisis has passed the five-year mark, stock and bond markets remain in a kind of surreal limbo, a literal suspense, upheld by expectations of further stimulus, reflecting the fact that genuine recovery is lacking. Commodity markets give the same sense of deviation from any discernible, lasting trend.

In its weekly oil report last week, KBC Process Technology described the basic complication created by the repeated actions of the US Federal Reserve. Its core suggestion was that a third bout of quantitative easing (dubbed QE3) would, according to logic and precedent, provoke another jump in oil prices, already arguably a drag on world growth at anything in excess of $100 a barrel.

It does seem ironic that the US authorities may be tempted to reinstate the same policy measure which has previously driven prices higher, thereby diminishing real wealth, effectively transferring it to energy producers. Except for the fact that over time the boost to prices will rebound, prompting demand to retreat, the Gulf and others might rub their hands with gleeful expectation.

How OPEC tries to reason its strategy in the face of such confusion among its customers can only be guessed. How much to ease output to quell the higher prices unsubstantiated by sustainable growth? How, as producers, to respond to the results of a strategy by consuming countries which appears to be quite possibly self-defeating? Notwithstanding the changing patterns of energy usage, oil price fluctuations still have a significant, determining effect on the global cycle.

With net hydrocarbon exports still the predominant element of GDP in most GCC countries (see chart), the region has to keep its eye on an increasingly elusive target while making its continual assessment of the optimal trade-off between expected prices and volumes.

Gary Godwin, principal consultant at KBC, says Saudi Arabia has a “delicate position”, which they have managed well so far, steering supply to keep a $100-120 price range. A floor of around $90 applies, based on the long-range marginal cost of crude production, besides the Saudi need to balance its budget, but demand destruction has been evident when Brent has moved to the higher part of the band, he advised this week.

What the consultancy calls the “miasma” of the financial crisis (presumably along with the meltdown in associated policy credibility!) may not itself be too disturbing to oil price trends if that degree of control can be maintained.

But, as Barclays Capital has suggested, with masterly understatement in a recent research note, “geopolitical issues are now poised to gain more purchase as a price determinant. Syria represents a severely complicating factor.”

That’s the kind of non-quantifiable influence that no model can quite capture nor analyst stipulate in advance, yet which from time to time will dominate market perceptions and therefore price behaviour.