Crude oil prices are currently sitting at $107 per barrel. That's high, but a lot of reports in the media have called it a spike. Is it a spike? Maybe. I went back into history and got some data from Inflation Data on both nominal and inflation adjusted crude oil prices since 1946. It doesn't look like a spike, it looks more like a trend, even where the inflation adjustment is available, prices are almost uniformly uni-directional.
