We once again got a rather “dovish” Federal Reserve that said it would continue to wait for what it considers good enough data for raising the fed funds rates.

Taking a closer look at the latest FOMC dot-plot chart, we see the FOMC participants expect the Fed will start raising rates later this year, closer to December than September, which is also reflected in the CME 30-Day Federal Funds Futures.

When we take into consideration how the Fed looks at inflation, then we shouldn’t be surprised at all if the Fed doesn’t start raising rates this year. Of course, it’s still a long way to December.

The expectations about where fed funds could be in 2017, and by using the fifth dot plot reference, we see it has come down from the 2.5-3.0 percent zone in March to the 2.0-2.5 percent zone. So on Thursday, “risk-on” was back in the U.S. markets that negated the ongoing Greek crisis and helped the Nasdaq surging into all-time record territory on Thursday.

Risk-on also caused the dollar to weaken somewhat further, which should make American exporters and multi-nationals happy, at least for the time being.

Maybe an usual angle to look at Fed policy’s impact on markets, but as many investors and consumers are interested in the probable forward path of the oil price and now the Fed seems sticking to its close to zero interest rate policy, at least for the time being, it might be interesting to take a look at what we have learned from the recent past about the relationship between the price of oil and the Fed’s policy settings.

Taking a time-span of about 15 years, we see there is an undeniable linkage between oil prices (here we will refer to the world reference of Brent crude) and fed fund rates.

We see the big oil price rally that took place between 2001-2008 peaked after 11 months of aggressive easing by the FOMC while during the latter stages of that move, between August 2007 and June of 2008, the upward slope was clearly fuelled by a rapid series of rate cuts by the Fed because of a rapidly slowing housing market.

It could be good to remember, between December of 2008, when the U.S. first introduced QE, and June of 2014, when the FOMC was ending its asset purchase program, Brent crude nearly tripled in price. Oil finally came down rather precipitously when it became crystal clear OPEC wouldn’t change its output target during the semi-annual OPEC meeting in November.

What’s also interesting is that monetary policy settings outside of the U.S. like the ECB starting its own QE program in January had also its impact on crude prices when in fact prices began to stabilize around January 15, which coincided with the day that the Swiss National Bank (SNB) abandoned its “peg” to the euro and it became clear the ECB was definitively to embark on a massive QE.

Nevertheless, the ECB QE’s impact faded relatively rapidly by the end of February — beginning of March, when crude prices drifted down about 15 percent while at the same time we saw renewed demand for the dollar.

After that it were the dovish comments from Fed Chair Janet Yellen post the FOMC meeting of March 17-18 along with the start of air strikes by a Saudi-led coalition on Houthi militia in Yemen on March 26 that made crude to rally between mid-March and mid-May.

So, for oil investors the big question remains where could oil prices be headed in the near future. I think we could see relative stability in the oil price that started to emerge around mid-May.

Things could turn rather quickly the day the Fed starts raising rates. So, watch out as there is still potential to the downside because oversupply remains a fact, global growth remains sluggish and a nuclear deal with Iran remains a possibility.

Finally, on Greece, I think one anecdotal event at the Eurogroup meeting on Thursday says it all when ECB executive board member Benoît Cœuré answering a question of Mr. Dijselbloem, head of Eurogroup, if Greek banks would be able to open on Friday said: “Tomorrow, yes. Monday, I don't know.”

So, let’s wait and see what on Monday comes out of the EU emergency meeting.

Of course, miracles do happen, but, unfortunately, they remain rather rare.