Are we on track for the worst oil shock in 50 years?
Every oil shock feels unprecedented while you are living through it. The way to tell a genuine crisis from a scare is to line the price path up against the ones that already rewrote the global economy, and to strip out inflation so a 1974 dollar and a 2026 dollar mean the same thing.
This chart does that. It takes the 1973 OPEC embargo and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, converts both to 2026 dollars, and plots today’s Brent price on the same axis from the month each shock began. Read the current line against the historical ones and you can judge for yourself how far along a comparable path 2026 has travelled.
Are we on track for the worst oil shock in 50 years?
Historical shocks overlaid on the current trajectory, CPI-adjusted. The red shaded area shows the range of outcomes if 2026 follows the same relative path as the 1973 or 1979 crises.
| Shock | Start ($/bbl) | Peak ($/bbl) | Peak (2026 $) | Rise | Months to peak |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1973 OPEC Embargo | $3.56 | $12.23 | $74 | +244% | 23 |
| 1979 Iranian Revolution | $13.03 | $39.50 | $156 | +203% | 15 |
| 2008 Financial Crisis | $54.51 | $133.88 | $202 | +146% | 17 |
How this is built
Historical monthly prices come from the long-run Brent and refiner acquisition series, indexed to the first month of each episode. Nominal figures are converted to 2026 dollars using annual US CPI-U averages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, so the peaks you see are what each price would cost a household today.
The current line uses daily EIA Brent spot prices (series RBRTE). The red band projects where 2026 would sit if it repeated the relative climb of the 1973 or 1979 shocks. It is a what-if scaled from history, not a forecast, and it sits above the old lines because both earlier shocks started from a far lower real base than today.
Sources
Historical prices: Our World in Data (CC BY 4.0). Current Brent: U.S. Energy Information Administration (public domain). Inflation index: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U (CUUR0000SA0).