Crude oil has crossed back above $100 a barrel, a threshold that carries as much psychological weight as economic consequence, driven by the enduring tension between constrained global supply and the world's insatiable appetite for energy. The surge — an 8 percent weekly gain — arrives not in isolation but amid broader financial turbulence, with record US diesel prices signaling that scarcity has moved from abstraction to lived reality for industries and households alike. As markets pause to take stock, the next chapter of this story may be written not in Houston or Riyadh, but in Beijing, whe