Rising oil prices: When will the situation ease?

The Bundestag has once again decided on a fuel discount, and a fuel price cap could soon follow. Both measures are controversial - and they do little to change the fact that the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is making oil more scarce and more expensive. So when can we expect prices to ease? Or will fuel and heating oil remain permanently expensive?

That's what the new episode of "Is that a bubble?", ZEIT's economic podcast, is about. The guest in this episode is ZEIT correspondent Thomas Fischermann, who is currently researching the Persian Gulf. He has been reporting on the situation in the Strait of Hormuz for months and has been concerned with globalization for many years. In the podcast he reports on where in the world the consequences of the oil crisis are particularly evident, who are the winners and who are the losers from developments on the oil market and how the oil-producing states in the Middle East are reacting to open up new trade routes. And he reveals whose oil is passing through the Strait of Hormuz despite the blockade - and how much there actually is.

Hosts Jens Tönnesmann and Zacharias Zacharakis also discuss with Fischermann when global oil demand could peak and fall again, how the oil market actually works and whether the oil crisis is another indication of the end of globalization - or whether free trade will ultimately prove to be stronger than political export restrictions.