In much the same way that one can use the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to measure changes in the cost of living, one can index the price of oil, an international commodity that trades in dollars, to the value of the dollar to assess the impact of the dollar’s declining value on the price of oil. 

After indexing the prices of crude oil and gasoline to the trade-weighted value of the dollar beginning with the Federal Reserve’s commencement of its program of quantitative easing, the commentary attributes $17.04 per barrel of the price of Brent crude oil to the declining value of the dollar and approximately 56.5¢ of the $3.963 of the national average retail price of regular gasoline.