This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 20th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Often low oil prices indicate something good and something bad, a harbinger of recession, and lower input costs for many businesses.

This time is different.

Sharp declines in oil prices indicate both a recession just as relatively few people are getting on the road.

So what are the implications for foreign policy?

Cato's Emma Ashford explains.

Well, it's been a pretty rough ride in the oil markets the last week. They dropped through, the price of oil

basically dropped through the floor last week. Sunday night into Monday morning, American Time, we basically saw the price of

oil go from where it had been about 55-ish dollars a barrel and over the course of the last

week it has dropped until it is now somewhere in the

vicinity of $25 a barrel.

That is a low price that we have not seen, we didn't even see a price that low during the

financial crisis in 2008. So this has been a massive

disruption in the oil market. What does that mean economically? The United States

government as far as I know, has purchased a lot of oil.

What was the purpose of that?

Yeah, so for the US, there's a couple of things that matter.

So one is that low oil prices are bad for US producers.

We're now a major producer of energy with fracking in New Wells, so in places like Texas or Western Pennsylvania or the Dakota's,

those are big, big producing states now and that's been part of sort of

America's energy resurgence that's happened in the last few years, part of our

...