Trump may declare that it is time for oil production in the US to soar but he’s come up against what Wall Street has pointed out. The FT writes that “lower oil and gas prices would make shale companies less profitable — and less likely to follow Trump’s command to “drill, baby, drill”, executives warned. “Prices will be a bigger signal than politics.”

The market will rule. Or, to put it in Karl Marx’s words of 1853:

“The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.”