this is not a very sharp move... sure, oil is up a bit, but it's nothing unusual to see oil up or down by 2% over a six hour time frame. oil has had much bigger moves both on the upside and downside over the last 2 years. i seem to recall days over the last two years where oil would be up or down by around 10% in a single day. and oil is still about 50% below its peak... so it's not like we're in panic mode all of a sudden because oil broke out to the upside, mostly as a result of a technical trading pattern IMO. oil at $78 isn't the end of the world. a rising oil price will create problems obviously, but the strength in oil is only due to weakness in the dollar. in fact, oil is still quite cheap at the moment. when the price of oil is measured in foreign currencies, oil is still very low and relatively stable in price... and priced in gold, oil is not all that expensive on a historical basis.
and even though i'm sure many people would disagree with this assessment... a high oil price is actually a positive thing for the strength of the dollar. despite all the recent rumours of moving away from the petro-dollar (like the article in the Independent), oil today is still sold in US dollars. that means that if a country wants to have oil, they have to have dollars. and if they think the price of oil is going to go up, that means that they'll have to hold more dollars in order to purchase that oil. This essentially backs the dollar by oil. Because when the dollar went off the gold standard, it went onto an oil standard. so a high oil price will increase the demand for dollars and act as a force to strengthen the dollar. so as the government and the fed print more money and debase the currency, this will cause the price of oil to rise, since you now require a greater quantity of dollars to buy that same barrel of oil. but this also means that foreign countries who want oil, also now need more dollars in order to purchase that oil... so they've got to go out and earn more dollars. this is not difficult because there are more dollars out there now to be earned... but as more and more dollars are printed, more and more of those printed dollars need to be collected for continue paying for the oil. The obvious problem with scheme is that the oil producing nations end up with all these dollars that are practically worthless.... because they don't really need to buy any oil, so there is not really anything the OPEC nations can buy with their dollars. they can buy goods from other countries in exchange for the dollars (since foreign countries need the dollars to buy more oil)... but these countries are already being flooded by the supply of newly printed dollars coming out of America. so the deal is that all these petro dollars that are collected from the global oil sales is that the dollars are loaned back to Americans in order to give them all this "credit" and finance the big government spending though buying the Treasury Bonds.
but back to rising oil prices for a second... if the price of oil were to rise today for factors unrelated to inflation... for instance, if there was a war against Iran and oil production and delivery got all messed up for a while.... this might double or triple the price of oil practically overnight. i think this outcome should fundamentally make the dollar stronger because now all of a sudden, there is about the same amount of dollars as there were yesterday, but because of the war, tomorrow i need 3x as many dollars to buy the same amout of oil, so therefore these countries need to scramble to buy more dollars. however, if the price of oil were to rise due to inflation... the dollar does not strenghten in this environment, but it will not lose as much value as it otherwise would because the extra demand for dollars that results will help to act as a force pushing the dollar higher.... i think ultimately, the inflation forces will win out and will push the dollar lower, but the extra demand from the petro-dollar does put some upword pressure so that the decline isn't as steep.