The Role of the Monetary Policy of the US Federal Reserve in Regulating Global Oil Prices

Abstract

The increasing role of the financial sector has become the objective reality of the modern world. The process of financialization has led to the transformation of commodity markets into financial ones. Pricing in the world of finance is based primarily on the volume of money supply and the availability of funds for investors and speculators, while the fundamental ratio of demand and supply of a particular product is fading into the background. Oil, like most commodity assets, has long become an exchange-traded financial instrument, and the volume of operations of hedge funds and investment banks with oil futures exceeds the turnover in the physical oil market by an order of magnitude. The regulator of operations with “paper” oil is the US Federal Reserve. The dynamics of oil quotes largely depend on the direction of movement of the Fed key rate in the direction of increasing or decreasing. The study allows us to identify factors and conditions for the formation of modern "oil reality", to determine the main features of the paradigm of development of the world oil market, its transformation in the direction of increasing competition between the main trading