the year 2008 revealed one of the risks of continued reliance on oil when
Financial crisis of 2007–2008 Rapid increases in a number of commodity prices followed the collapse in the housing bubble. The price of oil nearly tripled from $50 to $147 from early 2007 to 2008, before plunging as the financial crisis began to take hold in late 2008.[162] Experts debate the causes, with some attributing it to speculative flow of money from housing and other investments into commodities, some to monetary policy,[163] and some to the increasing feeling of raw materials scarcity in a fast-growing world, leading to long positions taken on those markets, such as Chinese increasing presence in Africa. An increase in oil prices tends to divert a larger share of consumer spending into gasoline, which creates downward pressure on economic growth in oil importing countries, as wealth flows to oil-producing states.[164] A pattern of spiking instability in the price of oil over the decade leading up to the price high of 2008 has been recently identified.[165] The destabilizing effects of this price variance has been proposed as a contributory factor in the financial crisis.