The international prices of petroleum break a new record. I ask myself, how many times I have begun an article in which it goes of the year with the same phrase. Although, the causes have varied to a certain extent, are factors that are repeated and other that receive renewed force day to day. Which are, in this opportunity, the causes of the increase of the international prices? I would say that everything is transformed in a unique factor: the sensitivity of the international markets before a vertiginous deceleration of the world-wide economy. Normally, the stockbrokers take certain risk levels when investing their assets that nowadays, are not arranged to take. The agricultural commodities, the metals and

especially petroleum, are seen like attractive goods for the investment because their prices are increased of continuous and accelerated form, generating a margin of truly important gain for that today buys a product that tomorrow will be able to place in the international market and to obtain an assured gain. Any indicator from which the price of assets can get to raise serves as excuse so that the speculators buy great amounts to future, increasing therefore the demand, and making raise the international prices. This situation has stayed and even harnessed in which it goes of the year, which is changing are detonating the precise ones of the increases of price, those excuses which they take to the shareholders to buy futures, shooting by clouds the international prices of the raw materials. Today petroleum surpassed in New York the US$ 122 dollars the barrel, and in London, US$ 120,59. This time, the reasons have been mainly geopolitical, although harnessed with one it weighs fall of the value of the dollar with respect to the Euro. Whereas in the north of Iraq, the Turkish forces resumed incursions through the border against the Kurd insurgents, putting in danger the facilities of oil operation of the region; in Nigeria, militants of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Delta of Niger attacked the oil facilities of the anglian-Dutch group Shell, to the south of Nigeria. Simultaneously, Iran wakes up the fear of which his government uses of hostage to the oil production like part of the negotiations on his nuclear program. In order to understand the evolution of the price of the crude one it is not necessary to be a shining economist, but to know the different forms that the power in the international relations takes.