[IMRight]

Any chance you have that chart in a larger scale? I can't see a relationship between price spikes and GDP dips/gains at this scale.

Maybe just expanding the Y-axis would solve this.

[expat_panama]

that chart in a larger scale?

No problem, although I can't see a hard relationship between gdp and oil at any scale-- probably because it mainly exists in the minds of the true pessimist.  Well, sure the oil price as some effect, but so do things like the dot.com bust and 9/11.

The numbers are crunched from Freelunch.com, the BEA, etc.   Interesting thing in the format is these gif files are weird; the big pic one uses a file size just a tad bigger the small pic.