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For years uncertainty over the future price of oil has given petrochemical producers a major headache. Prices have not been stable for almost a decade making predictions for rates of return on investment almost impossible. But to make matters worse, the price fluctuations are now beginning to affect the Chemicals‘ industry.

Since the summer, oil prices have been falling, from over $100 a barrel to a less than $70 today (December 2014 prices). This is due to oversupply in the global market. Everyday, the world uses 93.2 billion barrels of oil, but the world is currently pumping out 93.9 billion barrels.

This oversupply is a result of OPEC’s (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) refusal to cut production. Whilst analysts are not certain why this is happening, one theory is that Saudia Arabia is hoping to force higher-cost players, such as North America and Northern Europe, out of the market.

I don’t know why, but the human mind is naturally drawn to the idea that ‘it won’t happen to me‘.

Car accidents are someone else’s problem, someone else will get the disease and we convince ourselves that a plane will never crash whilst we are onboard. As a result, we take cheap insurance (if any) and hope for the best. And so it is with business fraud. Companies continue to assume that their business is secure and that their experience in trading will allow them to recognise a potential crime before it happens.

But this is something that tricksters and conmen the world over work with, more so than ever before. As our world grows smaller, we are more likely to do business with people we have never met, or do business in places where honesty is not ranked as highly as in societies like our own.

Whilst we often think of online or business fraud as someone scamming money from a personal bank account by hacking into the family Xbox connection, this is a common misconception. More often than you think, vendors and suppliers are the ones who steal.

Every once in a while a breakthrough is made in the ongoing advance of civilization. Sometimes it is in technology, such as the invention of the telephone. Sometimes it is in medicine, such as the discovery of penicillin. And sometimes it is in commerce, such as the setting up of the first online shopping (via televisions) by the entrepreneur Michael Aldrich in 1979.

But often when a breakthrough is made, it takes time for people to get used to the idea. For example, the telephone was thought of as an unnecessary development when discussed in the House of Commons in London soon after it was patented in 1875, and was considered ‘only useful in remote places, such as America or Africa.’

The same can be said of the drug Penicillin, which is still widely used today (in various forms) to treat a range of infections, and yet was not mass produced until 1944, when the U.S. hurried up production in time for the D-day landings in Normandy. That was some 16 years after its original discovery by Alexander Fleming in September 1928.