The View | The crystal ball looks murky when it comes to oil market

As the new year settles in it’s time to get out that dusty crystal ball to predict investments prospects for the coming year…actually I’m kidding because predictions are a mug’s game and this particular mug has been round long enough to know that investment predictions rank somewhere up there with the expert political forecasts that served us so unreliably last year.

However there is one area of forecasting that I find hard to shake off, namely the prospects for the oil market, which in turn has a tremendous impact on other commodity prices and much more besides.

I have to confess that this is largely a sentimental attachment emanating from the job I once had of covering energy for the London-based Observer newspaper during the glory days of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) – the oil producers cartel – nowadays you have to laugh at the very term cartel because so many key oil and gas producers operate outside Opec.

But back then, in the early 1980s, Opec was king and the King of Kings was the charismatic Saudi oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani. Oh, how we hung on his every word and tittered as he delivered witty asides.

There was a large press pack covering oil back then and we had the “arduous” task of travelling around the world to loiter in Intercontinental Hotels, the venue of choice for these events, waiting for a hint of what these generally uncommunicative oil ministers were doing.

The apotheosis of ministerial non-communication came when the Opec presidency passed into the hands of the Nigerian oil minister Yahaya Dikko, who brought new meaning to the term taciturn. Towards the end of an interminable meeting in London, during which Dikko had said precisely nothing, the press pack only succeeded in getting a single word out of him while the meeting was still in session: in response to a question: “Minister: are you mute?” he gravely replied, “yes”.