THINK Ahead: Energy shock déjà vu, but this isn’t 2022 in Stock News 06/03/2026 The spike in oil and natural gas prices may seem eerily familiar to the 2022 energy crisis, but the economic backdrop looks very different. From the jobs market to fiscal policy, James Smith explores what has changed over the past four years. Plus our team provides a guide to the week ahead What’s changed since the 2022 energy shock A glance at energy prices and the reaction to the Iran conflict seems eerily familiar to the start of the Ukraine invasion in 2022. Just look at the chart below. But is 2022 really the right playbook for how this crisis plays out in the global economy? To state the obvious, that is going to heavily depend on how long the conflict lasts – and how long the Strait of Hormuz is de facto closed. Our new forecasts, released this week, work off the loose assumption that disruption is relatively short-lived. A scenario where supply begins to normalise after four weeks brings energy prices down into the second quarter, and the macro impact is relatively contained. Eurozone inflation heads briefly to 2.5% in the second quarter and the US and UK to 3%. Enough to delay, but not derail, further Federal Reserve and Bank of England rate cuts. And not enough to move the ECB out of its ‘good place’. But let’s face it, we’re not military experts, and there is no shortage of warnings about this morphing into a much larger supply shock for the global economy. Qatar warned today that it will take some time for energy deliveries to return to normal even if hostilities end immediately. Markets are taking note; an ECB rate hike is fully priced this year. Our commodities team thinks three months of full disruption would take oil above 100 USD/bbl (check out their scenarios further down this article). There’s a lot we don’t know, so let’s focus on what we do. What is abundantly clear is that the starting point for the global economy looks very different right now from the beginning of the 2022 energy shock. Here are five ways things have changed: The jobs market is much, much cooler In 2022, the jobs market was still grappling with the fallout of the pandemic. There weren’t enough workers to satisfy demand as savings-rich consumers returned to normal life. Since then, job markets have dramatically cooled. That is abundantly clear from the astonishingly bad February US jobs numbers that are hot off the press, though bad weather probably played a role. Employment outside private healthcare and leisure/hospitality has fallen by 0.7 million workers since the start of 2025. Vacancy rates have collapsed on both sides of the channel. And in the US, so too have the number of workers voluntarily quitting their roles. We’ll get new data for both next week. US wage growth is down from 6% at the time of the Ukraine invasion to below 4%. James Knightley thinks it could fall below 3% this year. In 2022, the strong jobs market helped protect consumers against the energy crisis – not least in Europe. Faced with higher costs, they were able to move jobs to chase higher pay and protect their disposable incomes. That is much less true today. And if wage growth is less likely to take off as it did in 2022, that should mitigate the secondary impact of higher energy prices on services inflation – a major focus of central banks when they were hiking interest rates aggressively four years ago. US fiscal policy is less of a tailwind Part of the reason central banks were able to h