Farmers protested record oil and gas prices in Brussels on June 18. Few analysts agree on whether the prices will fall or continue to rise.

By JAD MOUAWAD and DIANA B. HENRIQUES

People who have spent their careers tracking the ups and downs of the global oil markets say their compasses are spinning. Oil prices rise for reasons they cannot quite fathom, and where prices will be a year from now has become, literally, anybody’s guess.
Those uncertainties have left regulators, oil companies and suppliers worldwide uncertain whether increases in supply or declines in demand will affect prices as they have in the past. Some wonder whether the market is broken in some way, creating a bubble of artificially expensive oil, which has reached about $137 a barrel.
“This whole industry has absolutely been turned on its head, said Stephen Schork, who edits an energy newsletter.
A major factor behind the steady price rise, virtually everyone agrees, is that energy consumption is surging in highgrowth countries, and oil supplies are not growing fast enough to keep up. But what confounds many experts is that the price of oil seems to be changing much faster than the world is changing.
For example, it took five years, from 2002 to 2007, for oil to go up by $60 a barrel. In just the last year, it galloped another $60 higher. For the first time since oil drilling began in the 1850s, the price has climbed for seven consecutive years.
Old assumptions that once helped traders foresee the direction of prices no longer seem to work. And energy experts offer radically diverse predictions .
Beyond that, however, there is broad disagreement about the role of speculators in oil markets - particularly a new breed of financial investors who view oil and other commodities as just another way to make money, like stocks, bonds and real estate.
The evidence of their impact is mixed, but consumers and lawmakers nevertheless are furious, saying these new financial traders are driving up prices. Senator Barack Obama has proposed tightening the regulation of oil speculators.
In a sign of rising concern about the impact of high prices, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called an impromptu global energy summit in Jidda on June 22. It ended largely in disagreement, with no resolution on what other practical steps should be taken to ease the crisis. The Saudis announced a production increase of 200,000 barrels a day .
One of the guideposts that no longer seems to provide much guidance is that the price of oil on any given day was usually higher than the price of oil delivered at some point in the future. But, with increasing frequency, the future price is higher than the spot price.
That development usually signals concerns over future supplies, encouraging refiners to stockpile oil, which has not happened yet. It also typically signals that prices are likely to fall, and that has not happened, either.
Of course, contradictory signals are an accepted part of the global oil market, which provides a third of the planet’s energy needs yet is largely governed by regional or local events - falling demand for gasoline in the United States contrasting with climbing demand for diesel fuel in China, for example.
Also, no two countries produce the same kinds of crude oil. As the lighter, more easily processed oil runs low, the world is slowly relying more on gooier, sulfur-rich varieties. That is straining the ability of refineries to produce more gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
Iran has struggled for over a month to sell about 25 million barrels despite the steepest price discounts on record. The oil is the sulfur- heavy variety.
Many economists see a straightforward explanation for rising prices: Global oil supplies remain tight and there is a fear that demand will outpace new production growth for years to come.
The high price “doesn’t mean we have a shortage today, but it means there is a serious worry about a shortage three to five years from now, said Adam E. Sieminski, the chief energy economist at Deutsche Bank.
But it still does not fully explain why prices have risen as fast as they have.
“There are a lot of cross currents making it almost impossible to say where prices are going to go, or where they should be, based on demand and supply, said Dan Rice, a portfolio manager at BlackRock, a large asset management firm.
One popular theory is that a falling dollar has driven investors to commodities as an inflation hedge. But Eric S. Rosengren, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, said there had been little correlation between the dollar and oil prices over the last 30 years. Another theory is that energy subsidies are distorting the market, by shielding a large swath of the world from the impact of high prices and thereby encouraging high consumption.
Developing countries are beginning to address that problem. Recently, China unexpectedly cut some of its subsidies, effectively raising the price of gasoline and diesel. But other subsidy cuts by India and Malaysia have been met with street protests.
Some experts who see today’s oil market as a bubble point to the record-setting stake that institutional investors have taken in the commodity markets in the last several years, estimated at $140 billion to $250 billion. A growing portion of that stake reflects rising commodity prices, not new money flowing in.
Michael W. Masters, a hedge fund manager, argues that index-tracking investors, who enter the market only as buyers, are swamping the relatively small commodities markets. “Institutional investors are one of, if not the primary, factors affecting commodities prices today, Mr. Masters has said. George Soros, the billionaire investor, echoed his views.
But their opinion is disputed by other recent market studies.
One, from Barclays Capital, noted that index investing represented no more than 2 percent of the worldwide energy market. And most of the new money flowing in this year went into various types of funds that were as likely to sell commodities as buy them.
These arguments are carrying little weight with distributors and marketers selling retail gasoline and heating oil. Like Gerry Ramm, a senior executive at Inland Oil, a fuel retailer in Ephrata, Washington, these battered business executives say financial investors are to blame for recent price increases.
Mr. Ramm said, “Prices are becoming completely disconnected from the real market.