Perhaps the only good thing that oil's flirtation with $60 a barrel provides is yet another opportunity to make predictions.

So far, so wrong, of course, for most economists, investors and energy experts who have tried to gauge the level at which a high oil price will harm the economy, send interest rates up on inflation fears or make the stock market tank. Some examples:

Deutsche Bank economist Stefan Schneider, March 2003: "If oil stays above $30 a barrel for the remainder of the year, that could well do it for both (the European and U.S.) economies."

Chief UBS economist George Magnus, May 2004: "If it's at $40 and still rising, then it becomes more worrying. I think we're now at the bottom of a range where we do start worrying about growth."

American Enterprise Institute economist John Makin, October 2004, when oil was in the $50s: "If the price of oil is close to current numbers by the end of this year, we will have a recession next year."

Not to mention all those predictions, which have flowed more steadily than Drake's gusher, that oil was about to settle down a wee bit lower than wherever it was trading at that moment.

Then there was Goldman Sachs's prediction of a "superspike" in oil to $105. Many guffawed, and for a moment, that call helped cause the price to top out to much schadenfreude. "He who laughs last, laughs best. When people were laughing, I said stay tuned," says Tom Petrie, an oil bull who runs his own energy investment bank and research operation out of Denver.

Yet, bizarrely, equity investors can still laugh. The stock market couldn't care less about $60 oil. Since mid-May, as oil has risen about $10, the Dow is up about 5 percent.

Oil is going up mainly because global demand is outstripping supply. A secondary reason is that as too much capital chases every asset, commodities get bid up as well. "Crude has traded more like a stock than it ever has before," says Dan Pickering, of independent research boutique Pickering Energy Partners.

Chinese consumption now is about 1.6 barrels a year per person, compared with, say, South Korea's per-capita consumption of 17 barrels a year. China's population, especially on the developing coasts, should steadily consume more. Mr. Petrie puts the chances that oil will rise to $80 to $100 a barrel in the next couple of years at greater than 50 percent.

That demand should be self-correcting: When oil gets too high, the economy slows and oil falls. That break point is a lot higher than most economists predicted. Will $60 do it? Or higher, given the economy's decreased dependency on oil, compared with the 1970s, when oil prices were higher on an inflation-adjusted basis?

"Oil prices may be the big conundrum, and interest rates, the linked, follow-on conundrum," says Mr. Petrie, referring to Alan Greenspan's head-scratching over why long-term interest rates have gone up as the Federal Reserve raised short-term rates.

So what is supplying stock investors with their Xanax? They seem to be taking their cues from the bond market, which has been complacent about the inflationary aspects of oil's rise. Some might contend that the fixed-income markets are signaling a global slowdown as investors buy bonds and keep yields down, but that's implausible. Sure, a slowdown might happen, but the bond market is reacting more to the capital glut and foreign demand, especially from Asian central banks.

Stock investors' reprieve from higher interest rates has come yet again this year. But they are ignoring the inevitable impact of higher energy prices. For example, gas consumption had been rising at 2 percent a year for most of the past year. But this spring, that rate fell to 1 percent, Mr. Pickering notes.

The thoughtful, rather than myopic, attitude about stocks might be, as hedge-fund manager Jeff Matthews puts it: "However cynical you are that it's a party that has to end, put that aside and look at what is: People have houses worth a lot of money, have jobs, inflation is low and interest rates are low."

That could be the right view -- for now. But those aforementioned soothsayers' only real mistake was being too precise. At some point soon, high oil prices will take a toll, and stock-market investors will pay. They'd be wise to buy some Exxon.