The dynamics of crude oil price movements: from financialisation of crude oil prices and price expectation perspectives

This paper aims to examine the price pressure transmission effect from the crude oil futures market to the spot market through price expectation channel. It derives the relationship between the spot and the futures prices in the crude oil market and finds that the changes of the futures price and world output significantly predict the spot price movement. The impulse responses and the variance decomposition analyses demonstrate that the effect of the futures price on the spot price change is limited in a shorter period and diminishes as transmitting to the medium-run and the long-run while the effect of world output eventually increases and dominates in the long-run. The financialisation of crude oil prices indeed leads to a more drastic and frequent variation of price expectation among market participants that acts as a catalyst that destabilises the crude oil prices.