, Columnist
How This Economic Recovery Ends
Every time there's full employment, there's a spike in oil prices. And guess what comes next.
Finding and extracting oil is expensive. No wonder it's slowed down.
Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
Every boom in the U.S. economy is different, but over the past several decades, each has ended the same way. First you get full employment. Then you get a spike in the price of oil. And then there's a recession.
The U.S. hit full employment in August 2015. And yet the prevailing wisdom is that oil prices will hold steady around $50 per barrel, or even fall because of production gluts. What could cause a spike? It's worth looking at both history and current events.