TTE daily-return beta to Brent crude by US unemployment regime (low vs high, N=36 months)
A tighter labor market is supposed to amplify the oil sensitivity of an integrated major. For TotalEnergies, the theory was straightforward: with unemployment low and demand humming, the stock's daily reaction to Brent should be more pronounced. The data barely move the needle. Over 36 months split at the 4.2% median unemployment rate, the average monthly beta to Brent came in at 0.2635 in the 17 tight-labour-market months versus 0.2360 in the 19 slack months. That difference of 0.027 is noise — a Welch t-statistic of 0.418 puts the spread squarely in coin-flip territory.
The full breakdown below walks through the monthly regressions, the overlapping beta distributions, and why the extremes land in the opposite regime of what the hypothesis predicted. The evidence makes clear this lens does not separate the signal from the noise for TTE.
For TTE over the past ~3 years, does its daily-return beta to Brent crude differ between months when the US unemployment rate is below its median and months when it is above? I expect beta to be stronger during tight labor markets because economic expansion amplifies oil-price sensitivity.
How this was measured
Daily close-to-close returns for TTE (US-listed ADR) and Brent crude (Brent daily price) were aligned on common trading days. For each calendar month with ≥10 overlapping days, a simple linear regression (TTE return ~ Brent return + intercept) was estimated, yielding a monthly beta. The US unemployment rate (from the global macro frame) was assigned to each month using the month-start value. Months were split at the full-sample median unemployment rate into a tight labour market (below median) and a slack labour market (above median). Distributions of monthly betas in the two regimes were compared with a Welch (unequal-variance) t-test.
The key numbers
Reading the numbers
Over 36 months, TTE's average oil beta was 0.263 in tight labor markets versus 0.236 in slack ones — a small gap that is not statistically meaningful (p = 0.68).
The charts
This box plot compares monthly TTE-to-Brent betas during low-unemployment months versus high-unemployment months. Look at the two boxes: they overlap heavily, and the averages are almost the same at 0.2635 and 0.236. The high-unemployment group does have a wider spread, with a maximum near 1.02 and a negative beta near -0.07, but that variability does not make the group reliably different. In plain terms, the data do not support the idea that oil-price sensitivity is stronger when the labor market is tight.
Regime summary
| Regime | N months | Mean beta | Std beta | Median beta | Min beta | Max beta |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Low unemployment | 17 | 0.2635 | 0.1183 | 0.2512 | 0.0648 | 0.4759 |
| High unemployment | 19 | 0.236 | 0.2576 | 0.2321 | -0.0735 | 1.0228 |
The takeaway
The short answer is no: over the past roughly three years, TTE's daily beta to Brent crude looks essentially the same in tight and slack labor markets, so the data do not support the expectation that low unemployment amplifies oil sensitivity. In the 17 months when unemployment was below its 4.2% median, the average monthly beta was 0.2635, versus 0.2360 in the 19 high-unemployment months — a difference of just 0.027. That gap is nowhere near meaningful: the p-value is 0.68, meaning there is better than a two-in-three chance you would see a spread this large from pure randomness even if the true betas were identical. The distributions also overlap heavily; the high-unemployment regime actually contains the most extreme beta (1.02) and the only negative ones, which is the opposite of a clean amplification story. So this is basically a coin flip, not a real signal. The practical takeaway is that monthly unemployment regimes, at least as defined by this median split, do not appear to be a useful lens for predicting when TTE's oil sensitivity is higher.
The fine print
- Only 36 months of data, so the test is thin and a true but small difference could easily be missed.
- Unemployment is assigned using the month-start rate, which is released with a lag — a mild lookahead bias.
- TTE trades as a USD ADR, so EUR/USD moves are mixed into the beta and not separated from oil exposure.
- The 4.2% median is computed from the same sample, so the regime split is partly in-sample.