Brent crude futures have barely moved. Crude oil is still cheap. If the futures were going to respond in a catastrophic manner they would have done so already. High oil prices and a recession are counter-intuitive. The futures market isn’t run by a bunch of reactionaries that would force the price of oil higher than it could sustain to maintain a profit.

All told in 2007 Gulf of Mexico Federal Offshore Oil total 414 million barrels. That puts it somewhere between the production of Iraq and Brazil.