What you're looking at
Two FRED daily series, side by side. DCOILBRENTEU is the Europe Brent crude oil spot price, FOB Sullom Voe, in U.S. dollars per barrel. DCOILWTICO is West Texas Intermediate spot, priced at the Cushing, Oklahoma storage hub — the delivery point for the NYMEX WTI futures contract. Both series come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and are mirrored on the St. Louis Fed FRED database within an hour of release.
Brent vs. WTI — the practical difference
Brent is lighter and sweeter than the average global crude, but slightly heavier and more sulphurous than WTI. The two benchmarks track closely because the global refining industry treats them as broadly substitutable, but a persistent spread exists. Pre-2015 U.S. export ban, the spread frequently blew out to $20+/bbl because shale-driven WTI supply was trapped at Cushing with nowhere to go. Since the export ban lifted, the spread has stabilized in a $2–$8 band, occasionally going negative when U.S. seaborne exports outpace pipeline capacity.
For consumers, the practical effect runs through gasoline. East and Gulf Coast refiners are price-takers on Brent (they import seaborne barrels), so retail gasoline in PADD 1 and PADD 3 tends to track Brent with a lag. Midwest and Mountain refiners (PADD 2 and PADD 4) work primarily off WTI. Track the pump side of this story on our US gas price tracker.
How fast oil moves the rest of the macro picture
Crude is upstream of nearly every CPI energy line. A sustained $10/bbl WTI move shows up at the gas pump within two to three weeks (≈$0.25/gal pass-through), in jet fuel within a week (airline ticket prices follow with a quarter lag), and in plastics / fertilizer / freight rates within a month. The biggest second-order effect is on headline inflation — energy is roughly 7% of the CPI basket, but its high week-to-week volatility makes it the single biggest contributor to monthly CPI surprises.
That noise is exactly why the Fed prefers core inflation (CPI ex-food-and-energy and core PCE) for policy decisions — same inflation tracker page covers both. Oil shocks also compress real wages faster than any other shock because gasoline is a near-universal household cost — wage gains denominated in pre-tax dollars don't buy what they used to once pump prices spike.
Caveats
These are spot benchmarks, not futures. They reflect physical delivery prices on the reference date, not forward expectations. For traders, watch the corresponding NYMEX (WTI) and ICE (Brent) futures contracts. Also note that EIA spot prices are reported with one business-day lag — today's headline number is yesterday's close.