The View | Oil crash surprise poses 2015 dangers just as market was looking less risky

Good judgment comes from experience. And a lot of that comes from bad judgment. The financial markets have perplexed everyone, most of all investment professionals who are paid to make sense of it. The year is ending with a dramatic flair rarely seen in financial history.

Oil has steeply fallen from US$110 to US$60 a barrel in the past six months. I've heard of coincidences, but I've never actually seen one. Whatever the real reasons for Saudi Arabia's current Opec policy, it certainly isn't randomly conceived. This year's oil crash will usher in a very uncertain and volatile 2015 in a post-financial crisis world that was supposed to be less dangerous.

Years of quantitative easing also represent an irresponsible policy unleashed on us by the US Federal Reserve. Massive distortions in financial markets are perpetuated by artificially low interest rates that were supposed to be a temporary monetary experiment. Now the experiment has become difficult to shut down. Since the tapering of bond buying was mentioned 18 months ago, global financial markets have unhealthily depended on macro analysis trying to guess when the Fed would increase interest rates.

Since the middle of last year, the almost unanimous consensus has been that rates must rise. And, of course, according to data from S&P Capital IQ, the yield on the 10-year treasury has fallen from about 3 per cent at that time to 2.2 per cent. This year, many asset managers underperformed the passive benchmarks and attributed part of the shortfall to their fixed income holdings that have been too short-term to profit from declining interest rates.

Then, almost no one foresaw the rapid drop in oil prices. Prices at US$100 a barrel were supposed to be a near permanent standard assumption for most business models. The shale industry operated on that basis. Saudi Arabia's oil protection strategy, for whatever reason, has pushed investors into an uncertain world.