Bankers at Citigroup, working the numbers on the global oil industry, suggest that at a price of $75 per barrel it is a $3.5 trillion-a-year market throwing off annual profits of $1.8 trillion. For comparison, if you treated the $11 trillion economy of the US as a business, it would be producing annual net income of $1.5 trillion. So, at these price levels, the global oil business is a more powerful entity than the world’s biggest national economy.
The resulting flow of financial wealth, largely from developed countries to the newly enriched emerging markets, is vast, unprecedented and opaque, and it is transforming the world at a speed and in ways that are still not well understood.
Last month, the Institute of International Finance forecast that the nominal GDP...
