So I thought I’d highlight a few articles written in recent days that approach this story from various angles.
 
A piece in the New Yorker, by respected business writer James Surowiecki, argues that the world has entered a new era of bigger volatility when it comes to oil and other commodities.
 
“The real story of the past few months isn’t that oil prices have fallen; it’s that they’ve fallen so far so fast, and that they may still have a long way to go before hitting bottom,” writes Surowiecki. “That suggests that the stability of the past few years has yielded to a new era of volatility, in which small changes in supply and demand will lead to big price swings.”
                 
Surowiecki goes on to explain some of the underlying economic principles that lead to high volatility in oil and other hard assets.
 
“Commodities are more volatile than other assets -- the price of copper fluctuates a lot more than that of a television set -- and oil has historically been more volatile than most other commodities; a 2007 study found that in the U.S. it was more volatile than ninety-five per cent of other products,” Surowiecki adds. “The biggest reason for this volatility is that short-term supply and demand for oil are what economists call ‘price-inelastic,’ which means that they don’t respond much when the price of oil changes. People don’t immediately start driving less when gasoline prices spike -- they just pay more for gasoline. On the supply side, drilling projects take a long time to start up or to shut down, so higher prices don’t immediately translate into more supply, or lower prices into less.”
 
Surowiecki explains that as a result, the way prices typically return to normal -- through increasing supply or diminishing demand -- doesn’t really happen in the oil market.
 
“So a two- or three-per-cent change in supply, which is about how much the shale boom and the Libyan rebound added to global daily production, can spark a huge move in price,” he concludes.
Most Investors are probably less concerned about understanding the whys of collapsing oil prices than the way it which that roughly 45% decline is impacting certain segments of the marketplace.
On that score, a piece by the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Zuckerman discusses how cheap oil in impacting other investable areas of the marketplace.
 
The piece discusses the obvious and not-so-obvious winners and losers tied to the big oil-price swoon .
I’d rather focus on the less obvious. For example, Zuckerman points out that certain commercial banks exposed to energy producers are clear losers, including Oklahoma lender BOK Financial Corp., which has extended 19% of its loans, by value, to energy-related companies; Cullen/Frost Bankers  and Zions Bancorp ).
 
In addition, the junk-bond market is being hit hard in part because 14% of those bonds are energy-related,” Zuckerman writes.
 
For those of you who wonder what kind of impact the oil-price drop has had on the stock market, check on Joshua Brown’s blog devoted to this topic.
 
Brown, a popular financial blogger, does a nice job showing how wrong-headed and contradictory journalists can be when they attempt to explain the stock market’s gains or declines on a particular day based on moves in the oil price
 
As he puts it in his headline: “they’re all making it up.”
 
Finally, as bad as oil has performed this year as an investment, it hasn’t been the worst performing asset.
 
As Quartz’s Matt Phillips puts it, that dubious honor goes to bitcoin, the electronic currency that was all the rage in 2013 but has fallen by roughly 52% this year.
 
“Clearly bitcoin bulls have found themselves on the bleeding edge. But the question is why?,” writes Phillips. “One of the clearest answers seems to be that some of the shadier usages of the currency -- say for evading taxes and buying drugs -- have been tougher to execute as governments increasingly try to clamp down on the “dark web” sites where bitcoin quickly became the cryptocurrency of choice. Collapses of large, unregulated bitcoin exchanges -- such as Mt. Gox -- have done little to instill confidence in the currency either.”
 
Anyone who thought that bitcoin was the perfect novelty Christmas or Chanukah gift last year for a spouse or other family member should be feeling bad right about now.