article: The boss of Total, speaking to the BBC this week, gave a pithy insight into the market - that they used to think $100 per barrel was effectively a price floor, and now it feels more like there's a ceiling. And yet neither is true, he added. The price goes up and down, no-one can be sure where and when. While it stays under the $60 zone, there's a lot of adjustment still to go in the Scottish oil and gas sector, as we learned from the latest Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce survey. It found nearly two-thirds of contractors reduced staffing in the past year. In the next year, 15% said they expected to boost hiring, but 30% said the cuts would go on. Just over quarter of the sector's contractors are more confident about the year following the survey, and 50% less so. But they're being resourceful. Even though the moratorium in Scotland may be made permanent, 70% expect to move into fracking and other unconventional drilling. Some 61% anticipate being involved in renewable energy and 85% in decommissioning over the next five years. The woes of the oil and gas sector help explain a lot about what's going wrong with the Scottish economy and jobs market. The figures out this week were described as "unsettling" and "an amber light" by the Federation of Small Businesses. That's something of an understatement. The unemployment rate is higher - 6.2% to the UK rate of 5.1%. Wales is at 4.8%, so it's not all about the rich south-east. The only nation or English region to have a higher rate than Scotland is the English north-east, with 7.9% unemployment. The gap, which was a permanent feature for the Scottish economy last century, has not been this wide since 2004, the point at which the Scottish economy began an unprecedented period of convergence with the UK's, if not bettering it. But it's the job creation figures that are more striking. In the first quarter of this year, compared with the last quarter of 2015, the Labour Market Survey suggests there were about 97,000 new jobs across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In the same period, Scotland lost 53,000 jobs. Since the first quarter of last year, the rest of the UK has seen employment growth of 454,000. If Scotland were performing like the rest of the UK, it should have nearly 10% of those. Instead, it lost 45,000 jobs over the year. The Resolution Foundation think tank puts it in the context of the downturn. Last autumn, Scotland at last reached the employment rate before the crash, back in 2008. It has now fallen below it again. Unemployment went up by less than 2,000 during the year to January-March. That was while the UK total fell by 139,000. So the other factor explains a lot - the rise in the economically inactive, people, aged 16 to 64, who tell the Labour Force Surveyors that they are not available for work. Among those aged under 65, the numbers looking after family, in full-time education and with
summary: Brent crude has been flirting with the $50 mark, and the prospect of a further rise towards a sustainable level in the sixties dollar range.