**7. Conclusions**

Crude oil and refined fuels are crucial elements of global trade. Through their financialization, these energy commodities sway capital markets and economic development around the world. Geopolitical struggles over oil and its distillates divide importing from exporting countries. Public policies responding to these economic and diplomatic conditions seek to nudge oil-importing countries from fossil fuels and toward a fuel mix with renewable sources and a lower carbon footprint.

Mainstream economics has exhaustively evaluated the volatility dynamics and connectedness of energy-related commodities. These effects vary considerably across time. Disruptions in supply and especially in demand punctuate distinct regimes in the relationship of oil and fuel markets to financial instruments and markets for other commodities. The rockets-and-feathers behavior of Edgeworth price cycles in gasoline markets may even reverse and follow the opposing boulders-and-balloons pattern, depending on the relationship of fuel markets to oil prices, capital markets, and broader business cycles.

At the same time, mainstream economics has traditionally relied on peak-to-trough methods to define these cycles and their temporal boundaries. Given the centrality of the time domain to fuller understanding of volatility and connectedness in energy markets, this article has used a new set of computational tools to define critical periods in the trading of energy commodities. Unsupervised machine learning and related fields of artificial intelligence promise deeper mastery of time and its economic meaning.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, J.M.C. and M.U.R.; methodology, J.M.C.; software, J.M.C.; validation, J.M.C.; formal analysis, J.M.C. investigation, J.M.C.; resources, M.U.R.; data curation, M.U.R.; original draft preparation, J.M.C.; review and editing, J.M.C. and M.U.R.; visualization, J.M.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Data Availability Statement:** Data is available from the authors and will be posted upon publication of this article.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
