Leadership Quote by Rodrigo Rato

The reassuring tone is doing more work than the sentence itself. Rodrigo Rato isn’t offering a bold economic insight so much as a stabilizing mantra: oil is expensive, yes, but look, the system hasn’t cracked. The key verb is “absorb” - a technocratic euphemism that turns real pain into a kind of invisible digestion. Prices rise, the world “absorbs” them. Who’s doing the absorbing? Not “the world” as a whole, but households staring at higher heating bills, import-dependent countries bleeding foreign reserves, and industries quietly passing costs downstream.

In context, this is the language of mid-2000s confidence: globalization humming, credit loose, policymakers eager to signal that commodity shocks are manageable. Rato, a prominent economic official of the era, speaks from an institutional perch where credibility is currency and panic is the enemy. The intent is to preempt market anxiety and political backlash by framing oil inflation as a stress test already passed.

The subtext is a wager: that growth, flexible supply chains, and central bank credibility can outpace a structural energy squeeze. “Up to this year” is the tell - it narrows the claim to the recent past, a careful hedge masquerading as calm. It’s not triumphal; it’s provisional. The line works because it sounds empirical while smuggling in reassurance, a classic policymaker move: describe resilience just long enough that people keep behaving as if it’s guaranteed.