The New Statesman.

Oil prices have spiked following the outbreak of war in Iran, with crude oil jumping to over 75 pounds a barrel.

This is already having a huge impact across the world and is set to get worse.

I'm Megan Gibson and you're listening to Daily Politics from the New Statesman.

Today I'm joined by Roy Johnston, oil market researcher and author of the Commodity Context

newsletter, who argues that this crisis could lead to a global depression.

Rory, thanks so much for joining us.

Just to lay the groundwork out for our listeners off the bat, the effective closure of the Strait of Hamoos has driven oil prices up globally and there's no end in sight.

Now, you, someone who doesn't describe themselves as an alarmist, have said in the past that this crisis could send oil prices to as much as $200 a barrel.

I was wondering if you could lay

out for us. What does the world start to look like when that happens? Yeah, thanks for having me.

To your point, I don't normally consider myself an alarmist, if anything, I usually talk about

how resilient and flexible the global oil market is. And we've seen that in pretty

dramatic fashion over the past half decade with the oil market, you know, seemingly actually

dealing fairly well and being able to adapt to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and pretty broad

sanctions, very, very broad sanctions against Russia, particularly from the European Union.

We saw the hooties

close off the Red Sea. All of these things have been things that historically we would have

considered kind of these massive tail risk scenarios. And the oil market was able to pretty dynamically

and pretty remarkably adapt to them in real time. And we got, you know, mild prices locations, but not an end-of-the-world

scenario. This situation is different because it's such a large loss of supply all at once.

It's kind of too much too fast. It bends the system to the point of breaking, and I want to

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