Loser: American oil producers. One of the big open questions is just how many of the small, independent producers in the American heartland have cost structures that make them viable with oil prices in the $60s rather than the $100s. Many have relied on borrowed money, and bankruptcies are possible. But because the companies tend to be privately held (their financial details not publicly released), analysts are doing guesswork in projecting how severe the pain will be.

Loser: Oil-producing state economies. As the American economy has struggled to recover in the last few years, the exceptions have been oil-rich states like Texas and North Dakota, which have enjoyed low unemployment and strong real estate markets.

But is the “Texas Economic Miracle” just an artifact of high energy prices and improving technologies to extract petroleum from the ground? Or is Texas’ low-tax, low-regulation approach really the recipe for economic success? Seeing how the Texas economy fares now that prices are slumping will be a test.

Loser: Vladimir Putin. Russia’s economy is already facing its sharpest challenges in years, as Western sanctions imposed after Russian aggression toward Ukraine crimp the nation’s ability to be integrated in the global economy. Russia is a major energy producer, and the falling price of oil compounds the challenge facing its president, Vladimir Putin.

Winner and Loser: Central bankers. Anybody who has fretted that years of money-printing by global central banks will create out-of-control inflation has some egg on his or her face right now. Plummeting prices for energy and other commodities are dragging down inflation to levels that are, if anything, too low.

The falling commodity prices are actually making these authorities’ jobs harder. The overwhelming urgency across the advanced world — in the eurozone, the United States and Japan — has been to try to get inflation higher, to reach the 2 percent annual target central banks in all three places have set.

In the short run, central banks tend to look through big swings in commodity prices, viewing them as one-time events rather than permanent shifts in the rate of price increases. But to the degree those one-time shifts change peoples’ expectations about future inflation, and lead people to doubt the credibility of the central banks’ promises to keep inflation at 2 percent, it is a problem. That’s particularly true when inflation expectations are already below where the likes of Mario Draghi, Janet Yellen and Haruhiko Kuroda would prefer.