The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that China’s consumption of oil has declined by about 1% after increasing 11% and 15.4% the previous two years.  The quick and dirty analysis might point to a slowing Chinese economy while other experts attribute the stagnation/decline in oil demand to the highly regulated Chinese energy market that has supposedly set a relative gas price at $1.63 a gallon.  Read the whole story from the New York Times. 

Many experts agree that China needs to maintain >8% growth a year to sustain its burgeoning economy and if this decline in oil consumption means a slowdown in growth this could be an indicator that world oil prices are beginning to slow down some if not all of the worlds major economies.  Although the U.S. economy has managed to post some gains both in economic growth and through job creation it’s service based economy is relatively slow to respond to high raw energy prices where as more industrial based economy like China’s will have a quicker and much harder hitting reaction to high oil prices.